Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance 9780271091662

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RADICAL DREA MS

Radical D Radical Radical Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance

Dreams Dreams Dreams EDITED BY ELLIOTT H. KING AND ABIGAIL SUSIK The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Half title image: Surrealist window at Barbara’s

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of

Bookstore, Chicago, 1970. Featuring Robert Green’s

the Association of University Presses.

assemblage, Long Before You Were Born, 1968. Reproduced with permission from the personal archives of Penelope Rosemont.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Names: King, Elliott H., editor. | Susik, Abigail, 1977– editor. Title: Radical dreams : surrealism, counterculture, resistance / edited by Elliott H. King and Abigail Susik. Other titles: Refiguring modernism. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The

Additional credits: pages xii–1, cover of L’Archibras, no. 3 (fig. I.2); pages 28–29, Surrealist window at Barbara’s Bookstore (fig. 3.1); pages 74–75, Henri Glaeser, interior of EROS exhibition (fig. 5.1); pages 126–27, Joel Williams, Surrealism in the Service of Revolution (and Vice Versa) (fig.

Pennsylvania State University Press, [2022] | Series:

9.2); pages 174–75, Martin Sharp, Max the Birdman Ernst

Refiguring modernism | Includes bibliographical

(color plate 15).

references and index. Summary: “A collection of essays examining surrealism’s cultural adaptations and genealogical descendants from the 1960s through the late 1980s. Explores surrealism’s interactions with radical politics, protest movements, the sexual revolution, psychedelic subcultures, and other engaged and subcultural trends around the globe”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021053551 | ISBN 9780271091358 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Surrealism—History. | Counterculture— History—20th century. Classification: LCC NX456.5.S8 R35 2022 | DDC 700/.41163—dc23/eng/20211208 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053551 Copyright © 2022 The Pennsylvania State University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003

To Ted Joans and chance encounters

Contents List of Illustrations  (viii) Acknowledgments (x)

Introductory Essays Surrealism as Radicalism (2) Abigail Susik and Elliott H. King

Surrealism and Revolutionary Romanticism in May ’68 (20) Michael Löwy

Part 1: Surrealist Solidarity 1. “Down with Art, Up with Revolution”: Protesting Dada and Surrealism in 1968 (30)

3. Angry, Hopeful Chaos and the Great Secret of Surrealism: Unraveling the Tangled Web of the 1970s (61)

Sandra Zalman

Penelope Rosemont

2. Ted Joans, the Other Jones: Jazz Poet, Black Power Missionary, and Surrealist Interpreter (43) Grégory Pierrot

Part 2: Against the Liquidators 4. Passionate Attraction: Fourier, Feminism, Free Love, and L’Écart absolu (76)

6. A Consciousness of Being: Burn, Baby, Burn and the Political Art of Roberto Matta (114)

Claire Howard

Alyce Mahon

5. “To Be a Painter Means to Oppose”: Exhibiting and Politicizing Robert Rauschenberg, 1959–1965 (92) Gavin Parkinson

Part 3: The Right to Insubordination 7. The Fantasy of a Powerful Myth: The Situationist International After Surrealism (128) Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

8. Afrosurrealism as a Counterculture of Modernity (142)

9. The Surrealist Adventure and the Poetry of Direct Action: Passionate Encounters Between the Chicago Surrealist Group, the Wobblies, and Earth First! (156) Ron Sakolsky

Jonathan P. Eburne

Part 4: Passional Attractions 10. A Useful Bile: André Breton’s Humour Noir in 1960s America (176)

12. Surrealism and Punk: The Case of COUM Transmissions (207)

Ryan Standfest

Marie Arleth Skov

11. Oz Magazine and British Counterculture: A Case Study in the Reception of Surrealism (190) David Hopkins

List of Contributors  (224) Index (227)

Illustrations

Color Plates

(following page 100)

1. George Lois, cover of Esquire magazine, November 1968

9. Désordinateur (Dis-Computer), installation view, 1965

2. Envelope from Franklin Rosemont to Herbert Marcuse, April 16, 1973

10. Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959

3. Ted Joans reads his poetry at the Café Bizarre, 1959

11. Roberto Matta, Burn, Baby, Burn (L’escalade), 1965–66

4. Ted Joans, The Real Black Power, 1967

12. Roberto Matta, La vertige d’eros, 1944

5. Cover of “Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution,” Radical America, January 1970

13. The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, June 1967

6. Cover of Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire, catalog of the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition 7. “Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices,” Fall 1979 8. Le consommateur (The Consumer), installation view, 1965

14. Cover of Oz, the “School Kids” issue, May 1970 15. Martin Sharp, Max the Birdman Ernst, 1970 16. Genesis P-Orridge, Venus Mount (or Venus Mound), 1976 17. Breyer P-Orridge, You Are My Other Half, 2003

Figures I.1. Police and demonstrators on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, August 28, 1968 (3) I.2. Cover of L’Archibras, March 1968 (5)

I.3. Chris Felver, Ted Joans at the Blackboard, New York, 1980 (12) I.4. Pierre Faucheux, cover of the catalogue L’Écart absolu, 1965 (15)

I.5. Roberto Matta, Disciples occupez la discipline: Pour une discipline révolutionnaire (16)

5.2. Installation at the D’Arcy Galleries exhibition Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, 1960 (97)

I.6. Bruno Barbey, France, May 13, 1968 (25)

7.1. Poster for “Surrealism—Is It Dead or Alive?,” November 18, 1958 (129)

1.1. Protest of the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage at the Museum of Modern Art, March 25, 1968 (31)

9.1. Robert Green, “America: Free for All,” Industrial Worker, May 1988 (163)

1.2. Installation view of the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage at the Museum of Modern Art, March 27–May 12, 1968 (33) 1.3. Gregory Battcock, “Museum of Modern Art Hires Guards to Keep Swenson Out,” New York Free Press, February 29, 1968 (38) 1.4. Illustration of William Rubin, New York Free Press, April 4, 1968 (39) 3.1. Surrealist window at Barbara’s Bookstore, 1970 (63) 3.2. Participants in the World Surrealist Exhibition of 1976 (70) 5.1. Henri Glaeser, interior of EROS exhibition, 1959 (96)

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9.2. Joel Williams, Surrealism in the Service of Revolution (and Vice Versa), Industrial Worker, May 1988 (166) 9.3. C. E. Setzer, “Whooose Side Are You On?,” Industrial Worker, May 1988 (167) 9.4. Hal Rammel, “Direct Action Gets the Goods,” Industrial Worker, May 1988 (168) 10.1. Andy Warhol, Tunafish Disaster, 1963 (187) 12.1. Cosey Fanni Tutti, Sexual Transgressions No. 5, October 1976 (214) 12.2. Pierre Molinier, Éperon d’amour (Love spur), ca. 1960 (219)

Illustrations

Acknowledgments This volume is the result of a collegial friendship first sparked at the 2012 College Art Association annual conference in Los Angeles, when we, the editors, were at the start of our careers as assistant professors at small liberal arts colleges on different sides of the country. Roughly eight years and several thousand emails later, this volume is a record of our friendship and a tribute to the many other alliances we developed along the way. In February 2014, our panel “Surrealism and Counterculture, 1960–1980” took place at that year’s College Art Association conference in Chicago. To an already impressive lineup that included papers by Katharine Conley, Marie Arleth Skov, Ryan Standfest, and Sandra Zalman, we hoped to add a special guest: Chicago surrealist Penelope Rosemont. However, Penelope proved very difficult to find; no amount of internet searching seemed to work. About a week before the conference, in one final push, Abigail decided to call the Heartland Café in Chicago, where Penelope had participated in surrealist poetry readings years earlier. A nice gentleman on the other end of the line explained that the Heartland had been sold and that the new owners probably didn’t know anyone by the name of Penelope Rosemont. He took down our contact information anyway. A few days later, Abigail’s phone rang. “Hello, this is Penelope Rosemont.” Our project quickly became a new kind of collaboration—one between surrealists and academics, a rare endeavor to say the least. When Penelope joined us on our CAA panel in Chicago in 2014, she told us that the police riots in ’68 had taken place right outside the conference hotel, where she and other surrealists had been handing out leaflets to protestors. Our hotel rooms were the very ones in which the Democratic National Convention delegates had stayed, unable to avoid the clouds of tear gas wafting up to their rooms. We realized then that our volume had to be one that accounted for living histories. With all this in mind, we are extremely grateful, first and foremost, to our contributors, who remained committed to this project even when its final shape remained elusive. At Penn State University Press, we are indebted to Ellie Goodman, Maddie Caso, and series editor Jonathan Eburne. The careful peer reviews organized by PSU Press improved the volume substantially; whoever you are—thank you. We also feel very fortunate that we were able to work with our outstanding copyeditor, Suzanne Wolk. Many people contributed assistance with images and permissions. In particular, we thank Robert Green, who generously supplied our half title image; Penelope Rosemont, who opened her archive to us; Laura Corsiglia; Cosey Fanni Tutti; the Genesis P-Orridge

Estate; George Lois; Karin Kyburz; Rachel Pointer (Industrial Worker editor-in-chief); J. Cameron Mancini (general secretary-treasurer, Industrial Workers of the World); Peter-Erwin Jansen (Herbert Marcuse Archive, Archivzentrum der Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main); Peter and Harold Marcuse; Julie Herrada (curator of the Joseph A. Labadie Collection); and Cheryl Hardwick-Moore and the Michael O’Donoghue Estate/ Evergreen Review. Support for the publication of this book was provided by the Class of 1956 Provost’s Faculty Development Endowment at Washington and Lee University. Additional assistance was provided by a Lenfest Summer Research Grant, also through Washington and Lee University. Abigail extends sincere thanks to Paul and Beth Garon, Penelope Rosemont, and Ron Sakolsky for their support. To Helen, Michael, Merridawn, Bryan, Selma, and the whole family, love and gratitude. Lawton Browning—ever in my dreams. For love and encouragement, Elliott would like to thank Emily (follement aimée); Lilianne and Vivienne; and his parents, June and Dale.

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Acknowledgments

Introductory Essays

Surrealism as Radicalism Abigail Susik and Elliott H. King

On August 28, 1968, the third day of the thirty-fifth Democratic National Convention, approximately ten thousand civil rights and antiwar demonstrators clashed violently with police in Chicago’s Grant Park. The protestors had arrived from across the country to oppose existing systems of institutionalized power and to push for the nomination of Senator Eugene McCarthy as the candidate who would finally withdraw US troops from the ongoing war in Vietnam. Anticipating a volatile situation, Mayor Richard J. Daley assembled nearly twenty-three thousand police officers and National Guardsmen to maintain “law and order”; their orders: “shoot to kill, if necessary.”1 At around 3:30 p.m., the police began beating protestors severely with billy clubs, ostensibly incited when a young man lowered an American flag on display in the park (fig. I.1). The crowd responded by pelting soldiers and officers with rocks and pieces of concrete.2 Clouds of tear gas enveloped the brawl, with some demonstrators taking refuge in the nearby Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue. The police riot stunned millions of viewers who had tuned in for live television coverage; it appeared that the country was tearing itself apart at the seams. To cover the convention and the violent unrest that ultimately surrounded it, the

editor of Esquire magazine, Harold Hayes, assembled a remarkable team of writers: Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Terry Southern, and war correspondent John Sack. The four men appear on George Lois’s memorable cover of the November 1968 issue of Esquire, staring confrontationally at the viewer, the body of an apparently unconscious protestor sprawled at their feet (see color plate 1). Lois had originally sent a photographer to the convention to shoot what he called the “unholy quartet” of “underground intellectual mavericks” in action, but after watching the traumatic footage of the “Chicago carnage,” Lois came up with the idea of a staged tableau that would symbolize the savagery of the police riot: Genet (“the French high priest of decadence”), Burroughs (“the Beat Generation expatriate spokesman”), Southern (“the irreverent ‘Candy’ man”), and Sack (“the anti-war war-correspondent”), all surrounding the “Christ-like image of a jeansclad student, lying in a bloody gutter.”3 The photograph unites the disparate group of

Fig. I.1  Police and demonstrators in a melee near the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, August 28, 1968, during the Democratic National Convention. Photo: UPI/Newscom.

writers around this stark depiction of police brutality, as if to cement, once and for all, the affiliation between the American counterculture and the European avant-gardes in an international coalition of dissent. What does Esquire’s coverage reveal about surrealism in the context of the Chicago riots and, more broadly, the politically engaged cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s? The question has both a straightforward and an expansive answer, depending upon how one interprets surrealist action and its import, and such complexities of interpretation encompass the methodological issue we seek to address in this volume. None of the four writers identified himself as a surrealist, though according to Southern’s account of the convention and protests, Esquire was aware of the implicit affinity between Genet, a mature member of the European avant-garde with ties to surrealism, and the prominent role that Burroughs and Southern self-consciously played in an American inheritance of that avant-garde precedent after World War II. Southern (whose contributions to American black humor Ryan Standfest discusses in this volume) even invokes surrealism in the opening lines of his report, writing that the violent racism evident everywhere on the streets of Chicago was like “something right out of a Buñuel movie.”4 Other witnesses to the Chicago events also used the word “surreal” to describe the bloodshed that ensued as police officers discarded their badges and waded into the crowds, batons in hand.5 3

Surrealism as Radicalism

It would be easy to overlook such passing invocations of surrealism in the 1960s, particularly given the paucity of scholarship on the surrealist movement’s activity and influence during these years. Surrealism has gone practically unmentioned in the ever-growing bibliography of secondary texts devoted to the “long sixties.” In the context of the United States, one might credit this in part to the large number of young people born during the postwar “baby boom” who lacked any historical context for surrealism before or during World War II. In 1964, seventeen-year-olds—that is, those born in 1947—made up the largest segment of the US population, while the founding members of the surrealist movement, most born during the last decade of the nineteenth century, were then approximately the same age as their grandparents. When free speech movement activist Jack Weinberg advised students in 1965, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” surrealism as an organized movement was already more than forty years old.6 From the vantage point of progressive activism, only a few ultraleft revolutionary currents from the 1950s and beyond vocally identified surrealism as a precursor, much less a partner.7 And yet surrealists were active—vigorously engaged, in fact—in the period’s protest politics and culture, and the impact of this ongoing radicalism was palpable on an international scale.8 While historical accounts of the 1968 Chicago convention highlight demonstrations organized by “yippies” and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members, for example—perhaps most notable in a surrealist spirit was the yippies’ nomination of Pigasus the Pig as a presidential candidate—it is often overlooked that surrealists themselves had a concrete presence in the Chicago riots: about three thousand copies of the August edition of Surrealist Insurrection, a wall poster/broadsheet produced by the Chicago Surrealist Group, circulated among the throngs assembled in Grant Park. Founded in January of that year, after Penelope and Franklin Rosemont’s return from an extended Paris sojourn spent in frequent contact and collaboration with André Breton and other members of the mid-1960s Paris Surrealist Group, Surrealist Insurrection had already established itself as a strident voice for the radical Left by the time the Chicago protests began. The first issue, published January 22, 1968, implored readers to give to the “Huey Newton Defense Fund,” supporting the cofounder of the Black Panther Party who had been accused of murdering an Oakland police officer and wounding another (the Paris surrealists answered with an international money order in March; the same month, the cover of the Paris group’s magazine, L’Archibras, featured a telephone with the dial’s numbers spelling out B-L-A-C-K-P-OW-E-R) (fig. I.2). The second issue of Surrealist Insurrection solicited donations for the Survival Fig. I.2  Cover of L’Archibras, no. 3 (March 1968). Editor’s collection. of American Indians Association, a group advancing the “restoration of the splendid cultures of our Introductory Essays

4

5

Surrealism as Radicalism

Indian brothers, against the tyranny of the US government, army, and ruling class.”9 Dedicated to “the total liberation of man,” the August issue seemed directed at the Democratic National Convention, demanding “a vast, multi-level, interconnected program of cultural guerrilla warfare.” Unquestionably, surrealism regarded itself as a partner and participant “in the service of the revolution in 1968!”10 To recognize surrealism’s support of the Chicago activists is already to go beyond the movement’s usual historical confines, which are too often misleadingly bookended by the two world wars or punctuated by André Breton’s death in 1966. Even so, it would be myopic to limit surrealism’s impact to members’ direct actions—even though many of these protest activities remain understudied. It is our view that the varied, implied, and sometimes latent affinities of key counterculture ideas and movements with the events and legacies of surrealist protest in action and in art are significant in their own right. This is so in spite of the fact that these affinities tend to be neglected as a result of disciplinary constraints, the continued epistemological influence of teleology on historical analysis, and persistent academic tendencies to shun the popular, among other pressures. In this volume we articulate surrealism’s example, influence, and longevity as a broad continuum of social and political radicalism that invites purposeful as well as inadvertent cultural feedback loops and revisitations. We do not intend this panoramic interpretation of surrealism’s permutations to diminish surrealists’ individual roles in the politics and culture of this period—quite the opposite, as several of the chapters included in this volume make clear. Rather, we hope to productively expand the scholarly purview and challenge the validity of historicist methods to surrealism’s persistently living culture. It is in this light that Esquire’s DNC writers serve as a fertile starting point for reconsidering what might be described as the generosity of surrealism’s praxis for continued cultural extension and adaptation for oppositional—rather than commercial, academic, or institutional—purposes. At the same time, we cannot wholly disregard the popular invocation of the term “surreal” to describe these tumultuous events. While the widespread interpretation of surrealism as a mere byword for “bizarre,” “dreamlike,” or “nightmarish”—a derivation prompted chiefly by the surrealist movement’s most famous artists of the 1930s (e.g., Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí)—does considerable disservice to the movement by limiting its multifaceted and pan-national character to the domain of art while also neglecting its vibrant intellectual and political rigor, it is nonetheless misleading to indiscriminately ignore this very real legacy of surrealism in the collective public consciousness. In the end, this popular reception of surrealism’s oneiric timbre, superficial as it may be in relation to the movement’s expressed aims, may have most completely infiltrated the decade’s visual culture, music, psychedelic subcultures, and other public and sometimes commercial realms. Although this volume is more interested in the Introductory Essays

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longevity and impact of surrealism’s social and political radicalism, our methodology invites examinations of revolt in popular culture as well. The concept of a surrealist continuum in the decades after World War II, both within and outside the movement, has been neglected in surrealism scholarship until very recently, with only a handful of publications addressing important intersections between surrealism and various nonsurrealist strains of social and political radicalism. Of these, Alyce Mahon’s 2005 book, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968, is among the most thorough and innovative in reframing the movement’s activities of the late 1960s as radically engaged, positing that the acme of surrealism’s revolutionary spirit could be found in the student-led protests in Paris in May 1968. Mahon’s contribution to this collection furthers her important work on this subject. The most detailed documentation of surrealism in the 1960s and 1970s, meanwhile, has emerged from surrealists themselves, and especially from members of the Chicago Surrealist Group, with authors such as Penelope Rosemont and Franklin Rosemont and affiliated authors Ron Sakolsky, Robin D. G. Kelley, and others demonstrating that surrealism was not simply active in the latter twentieth century but actually characteristic of the period’s wider spirit of emancipation and protest.11 To cite Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley with reference to the American atmosphere in the 1960s, a “Surrealist spirit was soon making its presence felt just about everywhere. Distrust of authority, defiance of injustice, and passionate yearning for Freedom Now! were in the wind along with a large-scale resurgence of poetry—not just reading it but living it—and a firm determination to change the world and have a good time.”12 Given the centrality of political engagement to surrealism’s collective aims, it is perhaps unsurprising that surrealist concerns would continue to dovetail with other political currents of the 1960s and 1970s. As the thirteen chapters in this volume attest, a number of both subterranean and conspicuous aspects of international counterculture in the postwar period invoked surrealism’s previous and ongoing radicalism in political views, cultural orientation, and aesthetics, as well as its continued engagement in actions for social change. We have already mentioned surrealism’s significant role in the spirit and especially the imagery of postwar popular culture. Although this impact cannot be outside our awareness, this volume consciously approaches its subject from the vantage of counterculture—a term the American historian Theodore Roszak coined in 1968. For Roszak, the generational gap, “radical disaffiliation,” and “cultural disjunction” instigated by the youthful counterculture posed one of the few remaining avenues of hope for breaking out of an existence of “immiseration” within the technocracy. Even so, Roszak’s own definition of the counterculture and who represented it remained unclear, and even at its origins in the late 1960s, the term in no way sufficiently encompassed the scope and impetus of the student, antiwar, and civil rights movements, to mention just a few key revolutionary currents in the United States alone.13 The resistance movements of the 1960s 7

Surrealism as Radicalism

and ’70s were not just against the prevailing majority culture: they were passionately opposed to the violence of war, capitalist exploitation, racist and sexist oppression, class dominance, and many other deeply troubling social issues—all of which are still with us today in various guises. Certainly, in this contemporary moment, when the notion of culture itself has been thoroughly destabilized by digital technology, global commerce, and the resurgence of different strains of fascism—and when the dichotomies of high/low, popular/elite, avant-garde/mainstream have lost relevance in the face of the omnivorous nature of internet consumerism—it is clear that Roszak’s simple binary of “the establishment” versus “the counterculture” cannot adequately describe the complexities of shifting cultural systems and modes of revolt against them. Accordingly, Radical Dreams alters and adapts Roszak’s generational paradigm of rebellion, with all its limitations, not as an operational theoretical construct but rather as a historical trope that gathered most of its meaning from the original context of his famous book and accrued broader meaning in its vernacular use thereafter. The “counterculture” referred to in the subtitle of this volume, then, alludes not to a transhistorical sociological notion of sub- or fringe cultures but rather to specific manifestations of leftist reformist groups and currents of cultural nonconformity that erupted internationally following World War II, and during the 1960s and ’70s in particular. While “counterculture” remains bound by its historical signification in this volume, our use of the terms “radical” and “resistance,” denoting a powerful commitment to revolutionary change, remains deliberately open-ended in terms of time and place, limited though we are by the necessarily perfunctory scope of a single volume. By placing surrealism within a broader history of radicalism and resistance in the twentieth century and comparatively alongside other instances of dissent and experiment, future studies of surrealism may succeed in avoiding some of the baggage of qualification and presumptions of aesthetic insularity with which it sometimes has been burdened—in the hands, for example, of writers such as the American art critic Clement Greenberg, who in 1939 envisioned the afterlife of surrealism as synonymous with mass-market kitsch, or the German theoretician Peter Bürger, who in 1984 described surrealism’s survival after World War II as a reactionary string of neo-avant-gardes.14 Likewise, concerning the ongoing debate within surrealism studies over the distinctions between, and validity of, presumed “orthodox,” “dissident,” “pop,” “late,” and “post” surrealisms, the view of surrealism as an ongoing form of radicalism mitigates to some degree historicist tendencies, artificial boundaries created by biased theoretical camps, and judgments about the authentic versus the pseudo among connoisseurs. If we set aside the hierarchies of Greenberg’s art criticism and the teleologies of Bürger’s modernisms and postmodernisms, among other hegemonic methodologies, we may discover the potential for the emergence of provocative cultural models; networks of latent and manifest affinities; constellations Introductory Essays

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of cultural adaptation, extension, and appropriation; precocious games of generational inheritance, disinheritance, and self-identification; passionate solidarities. Our use of the term “counterculture,” then, connects the oppositional resistance of avant-garde factions linked to “Old Left” causes with the disparate activities and aims of the New Left. We therefore agree with the French journalist Michel Lancelot, whose 1974 book about the “counterfeiters” of “la contre-culture” took Roszak to task for his failure to recognize the roots of the youth movement in the prewar avant-gardes, in particular surrealism. Surrealism, Lancelot wrote, is a “movement fundamental to modern counterculture.”15 Lancelot’s argument was expanded by the German sociologist and literary scholar Elisabeth Lenk, a student of Theodor Adorno and a member of the Paris Surrealist Group between 1953 and 1957. Lenk describes the surrealists of the 1920s as pursuing “social engagement as surreal practice” with a “vehemence that anticipated, in a nutshell, all the protest movements of the 1960s: antipsychiatry, prisoners’ movement, antimilitarism, critique of fossilized universities.”16 Another influential figure for our examination of surrealism and counterculture is the renowned theorist of the counterculture associated with the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse. Unlike Roszak, who had no connection to surrealism and whose frequently reductive opinions about counterculture were critiqued by various members of the New Left, Marcuse’s philosophy was deeply influenced by surrealism’s example and critically important to the international youth movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Marcuse corresponded with Franklin Rosemont and the Chicago surrealists for a number of years following a November 1971 conference for the journal Telos in Buffalo, New York. One of Rosemont’s envelopes to Marcuse from April 1973, embellished with hand-drawn psychedelic designs, seems to instill into a single piece of ephemera the immense importance of their rigorous exchange for a paradigm of contiguity between counterculture and its forerunners in radicalism before World War II (color plate 2). Writing about these epistles nearly twenty years later, Rosemont quoted from Marcuse’s final book, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1977), highlighting a passage from the preface that discusses the prefigurative revolutionary purpose of art: “‘The work of art cannot be comprehended in terms of social theory, neither can it be comprehended in terms of philosophy. . . . What appears in art as remote from the praxis of change demands recognition as a necessary element in a future praxis of liberation. . . . Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.’” Rosemont responded, “Could any surrealist have better expressed the surrealist approach to the fundamental problems of human expression in our time?”17 This volume explores conversations between surrealism and diverse international modes of resistance to dominant culture in the postwar period in four interrelated sections: 9

Surrealism as Radicalism

“Surrealist Solidarity,” “Against the Liquidators,” “The Right to Insubordination,” and “Passional Attractions.” Rather than present a chronological narration of surrealism’s historical reception and continuation after World War II, the four sections sketch what we see as a meandering story of surrealism’s oppositional culture through which related cultures and subcultures of resistance emerge and build over time and across place. While these four sections serve as an organizing framework and a methodological statement for our volume, they should not be understood as comprehensive or in any sense nonporous. Rather, we have taken up the call for what Ron Sakolsky describes in his chapter as surrealism’s “radical inclusivity” in the hope that this study will catalyze further investigations. A developing subfield may be required to address the vast and overlooked cultural history of surrealist countercultures—a project that, by its very genealogical nature, challenges the academic tendency to narrowly delimit the discourse of surrealism studies to questions of style, orthodoxy, or historical development. While the majority of our contributors are art historians, this volume ultimately attempts to undermine the confines of disciplinarity, publishing essays by academics alongside those of contemporary surrealists. One of the primary ways to battle academic misconceptions or obfuscations of surrealist aims is simply to include surrealist voices in scholarly discourse, although this has rarely been done in the recent past except by surrealists themselves. Using a methodology of hermeneutic continuity, the volume privileges material culture and transhistorical approaches, fosters relational rather than dialectical analytics, and maps spatio-temporal narratives of cultural migration, continuation, and longevity. Above all, our study approaches surrealism and its offshoots as a living and immensely relevant set of “cultures” that continue to morph and mutate in unpredictable and often unorthodox ways—for the most part fomenting urgent drives for social change. From our point of view, when surrealism and its related countercultures are studied as a set of resistance tactics and tools of direct action for social critique and transformation, rather than as just another instance of modernism’s influence and legacy, surrealism’s potential relevance for oppositional efforts in the present is also awakened. We commence our examination with an introductory essay by the French-Brazilian scholar and surrealist Michael Löwy, whose extensive work on surrealism over the past four decades has been pivotal in shifting scholarly dialogues away from an art-historical model and toward a deeper understanding of surrealism as a dynamic social movement rooted in political struggle. Löwy’s essay on May ’68 considers surrealism’s scope and span over the course of the past century from the self-conscious perspective of the present, thereby encouraging readers to read the succeeding chapters with an engaged orientation toward historical events as informing the contemporary moment. Part 1, “Surrealist Solidarity,” explores the idea that between the 1960s and the 1980s, different facets of international surrealism simultaneously fostered the internal Introductory Essays

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cohesion of surrealism’s ideas and aims, and also external alliances with nonsurrealist comrades from revolutionary and oppositional movements, such as SDS, Black Power, and the American Indian Movement. Likewise, certain countercultural groups evinced a powerful “solidarity” with surrealism itself, particularly when it came to the contentious issue of the musealization of this avant-garde, which became a symbol of the mainstream appropriation of leftist culture. “Surrealist solidarity” was a phrase favored by the Chicago Surrealist Group in the 1960s and ’70s and was related to the Chicago group’s interest in workers’ communities and unions, such as the Industrial Workers of the World, to which they belonged. Following its use in the workers’ movement, the term “solidarity” evoked for the Chicago surrealists an ethos of unshakeable mutualism amid constant struggle. In conjunction with this resonance, we employ the phrase specifically as a way of challenging the art-historical rhetoric of stylistic coherence and influence in order to emphasize the nature of surrealism as a sociocultural movement of interrelated affinity groups, which continually fostered and inspired liaisons with numerous allies in the so-called Old and New Left, just as it sustained and continually reignited the vigilance of its own social critique from the 1920s onward. The first chapter in this section, by Sandra Zalman, documents the protests that erupted in response to Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, the 1968 landmark exhibition of surrealism curated by William Rubin at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Zalman frames Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage as a prominent rallying point for the question of surrealism’s legacy among certain radical leftist factions in the United States at a time when large-scale surrealism retrospectives were seeking to academically historicize—and problematically ossify—the movement’s history. Next, Grégory Pierrot’s chapter addresses the way in which the American poet Ted Joans combined his dedication to jazz, surrealism, and the Black Power movement in what might be called an aesthetics of direct action (fig. I.3). Highlighting Joans’s Black Manifesto in Jazz Poetry and Prose (1969) and his participation in the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in July ’69, Pierrot argues that, for Joans, surrealism was a means but never an end to liberation. Part 1 concludes with a new essay by Penelope Rosemont, cofounder of the Chicago Surrealist Group in the mid-1960s. If surrealism can be said to have had a lively presence in American counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s, it is largely thanks to the Chicago group and its surrealist allies in San Francisco and elsewhere, who embraced the left-wing radicalism that was lacking in the American public’s general understanding of surrealism.18 In line with their international counterparts, the Chicago surrealists declared their ideological support of “virtually every distinctive current of sixties and seventies radicalism—including youth revolt, war protest, women’s liberation, Black Power, sexual freedom, Native American resistance, animal rights and radical environmentalism.”19 11

Surrealism as Radicalism

Fig. I.3  Chris Felver, Ted Joans at the Blackboard, New York, 1980. Photo: Chris Felver via Getty Images.

Situated within the period’s complex web of anti-authoritarian currents, Chicago surrealism was, and remains, an impassioned vehicle for what Breton cited early on as the movement’s dual “watchwords”: “Transform the world” (Marx) and “Change Life” (Rimbaud). Rosemont’s chapter frames the activities of the Chicago surrealists during the 1970s in terms of an “angry, hopeful chaos,” highlighting the founding of their journal, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, and their important 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition, documented in the catalog Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire. Part 2, “Against the Liquidators,” featuring chapters by Claire Howard, Gavin Parkinson, and Alyce Mahon, illuminates one of the core claims of this volume: that surrealist political engagement and active protest culture form the clearest corollary with the period’s counterculture movements. We take the title “Against the Liquidators” (face aux liquidateurs) from the title of a surrealist tract of April 1964—one of two statements disseminated that month protesting Patrick Waldberg’s retrospective exhibition of surrealism, Le surréalisme: Sources, histoire, affinités, at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris. According to “Against the Liquidators,” Waldberg had attempted to bury surrealism alive and reduce its cultural dynamism to caricature.20 Following the sentiments of this surrealist statement from the mid-1960s, part 2 of the volume argues that surrealism not only influenced countercultures of resistance in the 1960s and 1970s but also, through its own continuity of radicalism before and after World War II, itself became one of these many countercultures, albeit one with unusually strong foundations in the past. Claire Howard’s chapter opens this section by clearly identifying the dynamic synergy between surrealist genealogies of sexual and psychic liberation and the well-known counterculture enthusiasm in the post–World War II period for unbounded eroticism and psychedelic states. Howard places the 1965 international surrealist exhibition L’Écart absolu in the context of philosopher Charles Fourier’s writings on gender equality and sexual liberation and their reception in 1960s France (fig. I.4). Dedicated to Fourier, L’Écart absolu drew its title from his proposal for an “absolute deviation” from established institutions and modes of thought, and, as Howard argues convincingly, broadcast surrealist support for his platform of women’s equality, anti-utilitarian erotic pleasure, and nonmarital polyamory. Surrealist protest energies gathered at the nexus of antiwar, anticolonialist, and anti-oppression discourses, as Gavin Parkinson reminds us in his chapter exploring the enthusiastic surrealist reception of American artist Robert Rauschenberg. Parkinson places Rauschenberg’s French reception in the heated context of the Algerian War (1954–62), against which the surrealists were among the first to organize. This surrealist appreciation of Rauschenberg as against America, capitalism, and pop art can be seen as a prominent point of dialogue between the avant-gardes and the counterculture.

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Surrealism as Radicalism

In another instance of visualizing sensibilities of political resistance, Alyce Mahon explores Chilean painter Roberto Matta’s politicized reading of Freud’s concepts of Eros and Thanatos in relation to specific historical instances of war, torture, oppression, revolt, and social hope. Mahon surveys Matta’s disturbing invocations of torture and brutality during the Algerian War, and also the painting Burn, Baby, Burn (1965–66), which she presents as a response to the American race riots of 1964–65. Matta’s active participation in the Paris protests of May ’68, including the four protest posters he produced for the student movement, reveals another striking correlation between surrealist aesthetics and countercultural engagement in this era (fig. I.5). Part 3 of this volume, “The Right to Insubordination,” presents chapters by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jonathan P. Eburne, and Ron Sakolsky in an effort to articulate the ongoing potential for surrealist activity as a mode of radical praxis for activating political and social change—for surrealists and nonsurrealists alike. “The Right to Insubordination” comes from the title “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War,” popularly known as the “Declaration of the 121,” an open letter initiated by the Paris Surrealist Group and eventually signed in 1960 by 247 influential cultural figures in France, including the surrealists André Breton, Jean Schuster, and José Pierre. These signatories denounced the use of torture by the French government in the Algerian War and called for the recognition of the legitimacy of the Algerian struggle for independence from colonial rule and the right of conscientious objectors to opt out of French military service in the suppression of Algerian insurgency.21 We invoke this “right to insubordination” of the “Declaration of the 121” to call attention to surrealism’s ongoing protest actions from the 1920s to the 1960s and the movement’s general opposition to authoritarianism, colonialism, and other forms of social control and oppression. The chapters in this section highlight the ways in which surrealism has served as a foundation for both surrealist and nonsurrealist resistance efforts. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen begins this section by revealing the complex ties between surrealism and the Situationist International, connections that cannot be reduced to questions of legacy or the straightforward dualistic paradigm of homage and repudiation, originality and repetition. Rasmussen argues that Guy Debord continued to recognize surrealism’s crucial contribution to the formation of a socially engaged art, even while he excoriated the movement for its shortcomings and alleged failures. Jonathan Eburne pursues this inquiry into legacy, appropriation, and surrealism’s enduring relevance in his chapter on “Afrosurrealism,” a term coined by American poet Amiri Baraka in 1988. Baraka’s neologism gestures toward the international surrealist movement while remaining independent from it, demarcating, in Baraka’s words, a “broken quality, almost to [the point of] abstraction,” that “is a function of change and transition.” Eburne describes how Afrosurrealism offers a term for the simultaneous Introductory Essays

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“art” and “science” of Black counterculture, anticipating Paul Gilroy’s portrayal of the Black Atlantic as a “counterculture of modernity.” Ron Sakolsky concludes part 3 of this volume with what he calls an adventure story of “passionate encounters.” Sakolsky has worked closely with the Chicago surrealists over the past two decades to fortify the ties between surrealism studies and current efforts in radical activism in the United States and Canada. Much as the Chicago surrealists have continuously critiqued the historicization of surrealism in the American academic establishment, Sakolsky’s chapter, which chronicles American surrealism

Fig. I.4  Pierre Faucheux, cover of the catalogue L’Écart absolu (1965). Editor’s collection. Photo © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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Surrealism as Radicalism

and its relationship to anarchist currents from the 1960s to the present, destabilizes the distinction between past genealogies and present concerns. It does so by linking surrealism to causes of animal and environmental activism, feminism, and antiracism in the late twentieth century and the new millennium. For Sakolsky, surrealism’s ongoing war on “miserabilism” takes effect through the surrealist practice of automatism as a form of anti-oppression, pursued in conjunction with the tactic of direct-action protest. As noted above, Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley observed a surrealist “spirit” everywhere in the late 1960s, and it is this overarching visual, popular, and material cultural pervasiveness of radicalism that we emphasize in the volume’s final section, “Passional Attractions.” The title is adapted from Charles Fourier’s theory of attraction passionnée, which observes that humans innately pursue relations and form bonds with the things, activities, and individuals that stimulate the most pleasure and harmony. Profoundly significant to the surrealists in the 1960s, Fourier’s doctrine of passional attractions unites the chapters of part 4 under the working concept that significant nonsurrealist cultural formations in this era were organized around the impetus of surrealist affinity. Part 4 thus questions not just what interdisciplinary surrealism studies can learn from such affinity groups but also how, through their analysis, our field can become enriched, expanded, and more deeply engaged with political and ethical issues that continue to confront society today. The dissemination of a surrealist outlook is taken up by David Hopkins in his chapter on surrealism, psychedelia, and the English counterculture magazine Oz, and by Ryan Standfest, who provides a detailed account of how Breton’s conception of “black humor” was transformed into a radicalized strain of comedy in postwar America. Both Standfest and Hopkins consider the implications of the circulation and dispersal of surrealist aesthetics in the popular sphere, and how counterculture relates to the zeitgeist at large. Hopkins’s distinction between mass culture and counterculture is critical in addressing surrealism’s import between the 1960s and the 1980s—in terms both of the longevity of what Franklin Rosemont called the “surrealist critique” and of what Marcuse termed “aesthetic subversion.”22 It is with these watchwords of “critique” and “subversion” in mind that Marie Arleth Skov’s chapter on British punk in the 1970s concludes the volume. Skov contemplates not the notion of anachronistic postsurrealisms but rather polysynchronic adaptations and wandering migrations—and sometimes also pointed deviations away from— various surrealist antecedents, for fresh purposes Fig. I.5  Roberto Matta, Disciples occupez la discipline: Pour une disciof dissent. Expanding upon Greil Marcus’s 1989 pline révolutionnaire. Photo © 2020 cultural study, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. the Twentieth Century, which overlooked the possibility of synergy between surrealism and punk, 17

Surrealism as Radicalism

Skov’s chapter examines a key moment of dialogue between these currents in the London-based music and performance group COUM Transmissions (1969–76).23 According to Skov, the subversive appropriation, remixing, and collage practices of Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and others involved in COUM form a concise negation of the presumed dialectic between popular and counterculture. Skov examines the influence of surrealism and other European avant-gardes upon COUM’s DIY punk aesthetic and determines that the question of homage or critique is thus not so much a case of either-or as of both-and, mirroring the dialectic relationship between subculture and mainstream. Radical Dreams offers thirteen new essays on the subject of surrealism and countercultures of resistance, and yet we hope that this volume is just one contribution to a growing area of study that embraces the notion of surrealism as a social resistance movement. This is not merely a question of chronological purview or the inclusion of post- or late surrealisms, but rather of the fundamental manner in which we comprehend surrealism as a generous continuum of cultural and political radicalism with relevance for the urgencies of the present—not a historical dead end. In that sense, we are pleased that this volume remains drastically incomplete in terms of topics covered and avenues, traced and retraced, of past and future resistance. Notes 1. Johnson, “1968 Democratic Convention.” 2. Farber, Chicago ’68, 186. 3. George Lois to Elliott King and Abigail Susik, June 9, 2020. 4. Southern, “Grooving in Chi,” 83. 5. See, for example, Kifner, “Recalling 1968”; Bateman, “1968 Democratic Convention”; Mitchell, “My Political Baptism by Fire.” 6. See King, “Surrealism and Counterculture.” 7. Susik, “Subcultural Receptions of Surrealism.” 8. See Susik, “Points of Convergence.” 9. Rosemont, Rosemont, and Garon, Forecast Is Hot, 25. 10. LaCoss, “Dreams of Arson.” 11. See Rosemont and Radcliffe, Dancin’ in the Streets; Sakolsky, Surrealist Subversions. 12. Rosemont and Kelley, Black, Brown, and Beige, 237–38. 13. “The counter culture I speak of embraces only a strict minority of the young and a handful of their adult mentors.” Roszak, Making of a Counter Culture, xii. 14. See Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”; Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde.

Introductory Essays

15. Lancelot, Jeune lion dort avec ses dents, 86. Our translation. 16. Lenk, “Critical Theory and Surreal Practice,” 49. 17. Rosemont, “Herbert Marcuse and the Surrealist Revolution,” 38. See also Susik, “Chicago Surrealism, Herbert Marcuse”; Susik, Surrealist Sabotage. 18. See Rosemont, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. 19. Rosemont, Rosemont, and Garon, Forecast Is Hot, xiv. 20. Pierre, Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 2, 227. Originally published in CombatArt, no. 108 (April 13, 1964). 21. “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War” (1960), in Richardson and Fijalkowski, Surrealism Against the Current, 194–97. 22. Rosemont, “Herbert Marcuse and the Surrealist Revolution,” 38. 23. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 187.

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Bibliography Bateman, Christopher. “Reliving the 1968 Democratic Convention.” Vanity Fair, July 28, 2008. https://​www​.vanityfair​.com​/news​ /2008​/07​/reliving​-the​-1968​-democratic​ -convention. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Farber, David. Chicago ’68. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939): 34–49. Johnson, Haynes. “1968 Democratic Convention: The Bosses Strike Back.” Smithsonian Magazine, August 2008. http://​www​ .smithsonianmag​.com​/history​/1968​ -democratic​-convention​-931079​/?no-ist. Kifner, John. “Recalling 1968: Snapshots Still Vivid, Still Violent.” New York Times, August 26, 1996. King, Elliott. “Surrealism and Counterculture.” In A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, edited by David Hopkins, 416–30. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2016. LaCoss, Donald. “Dreams of Arson and the Arson of Dreams: Surrealism in ’68.” Critical Legal Thinking, January 12, 2011. https://​ criticallegalthinking​.com​/2011​/01​/12​/dreams​ -of​-arson​-the​-arson​-of​-dreams​-surrealism​ -in​-68/. Lancelot, Michel. Le jeune lion dort avec ses dents: Génies et faussaires de la contre-culture. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1974. Lenk, Elisabeth. “Critical Theory and Surreal Practice.” In Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, edited and translated by Susan H. Gillespie, 37–51. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989. Mitchell, Greg. “My Political Baptism by Fire: The Riotous Democratic Convention in Chicago, 1968, 42 Years Ago This Week.” HuffPost, August 27, 2010. https://​www​.huffpost​.com ​/entry​/my​-political​-baptism​-by​-f​_b​_696869. Pierre, José, ed. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 1, 1922–1939. Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1980. ———, ed. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 2, 1939–1969. Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1982.

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Richardson, Michael, and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, eds. and trans. Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations. London: Pluto Press, 2001. Rosemont, Franklin. “Herbert Marcuse and the Surrealist Revolution.” Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, no. 4 (1989): 31–38. Rosemont, Franklin, and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds. Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Rosemont, Franklin, and Charles Radcliffe, eds. Dancin’ in the Streets! Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists, and Provos in the 1960s as Recorded in the Pages of “The Rebel Worker” and “Heatwave.” Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2005. Rosemont, Franklin, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon, eds. The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts and Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, 1966–1976. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997. Rosemont, Penelope. Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. San Francisco: City Lights, 2019. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1969. Sakolsky, Ron, ed. Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings, and Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2002. Southern, Terry. “Grooving in Chi.” Esquire, November 1968, 83–86. Susik, Abigail. “Chicago Surrealism, Herbert Marcuse, and the Affirmation of the ‘Present and Future Viability of Surrealism.’” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 11, no. 1 (2020): 42–62. ———. “Points of Convergence: Chicago 1960s.” In Surrealism Beyond Borders, 112–15. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021. Exhibition catalog. ———. “Subcultural Receptions of Surrealism in the 1960s International Underground Press: Resurgence and Other Publications.” In Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism, edited by Natalya Lusty, 380–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. ———. Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021.

Surrealism as Radicalism

Surrealism and Revolutionary Romanticism in May ’68 Michael Löwy

Surrealism was very much present in the streets and on the walls of Paris in May 1968. As Donald LaCoss writes: Quotes attributed to Breton and other surrealist slogans peppered the streets: “Imagination is not a gift—it must be conquered”; “To the great outrage of some, and under the watchful, less punishing eye of others, raising its wings’ weight, your freedom”; “Down with socialist realism! Long live surrealism!”; “Long Live the Surrealist Revolution!” . . . Surrealist tracts from before World War II were reprinted and re-contextualized in the flyers, pamphlets, and newspapers of the strikers, such as Artaud’s “Open Letter to the Rectors of European Universities” that was reprinted by the radicals of the March 22nd Movement. Surrealists such as Mimi Parent, Jean Benoît, and Roberto Matta were conspicuous and contributed agitational propaganda to many meetings and protest marches. In 1984, surrealist Claude Courtot—one of those most active in L’Archibras [sic]—recalled that the events of 1968 not only presented “surrealism in the streets” but also demonstrated how unexpectedly that surrealist theory and action had far exceeded what the group had imagined. “We were almost marginalized by it. We felt we had been surpassed,” Courtot explained gleefully.1

The spirit of ’68 was a powerful brew, an intoxicating mixture, an explosive cocktail composed of various ingredients. Among them were surrealism and situationism, but also the writings of Henri Lefebvre and Herbert Marcuse. What all these things have in common is revolutionary romanticism, a protest against the foundations of the modern industrial capitalist civilization, its productivism and its consumerism, and a unique combination of subjectivity, desire, and utopia—the “conceptual triangle” that, according to Luisa Passerini, defines 1968.2 Romanticism is not only a literary school of the early nineteenth century but also one of the main forms of modern cultural criticism. As a structure of feeling and a worldview, it can be found in all spheres of cultural life—literature, poetry, painting, music, religion, philosophy, political ideas, anthropology, historiography, and the social sciences.

It begins in the mid-eighteenth century with Jean-Jacques Rousseau; runs through German Frühromantik, Hölderlin, English Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris, symbolism, surrealism, and situationism; and is still with us. It can be defined as a rebellion against modern capitalist society, in the name of past or premodern social and cultural values; as a protest against the modern disenchantment of the world, the competitive individualist dissolution of human communities, and the triumph of mechanization, mercantilization, reification, quantification. Torn between its nostalgia for the past and its dreams for the future, it can take regressive forms, proposing a return to precapitalist ways of life, or revolutionary utopian ones, when the feelings for the lost paradise are invested in the hope for a new society.3 Among the authors most admired by the rebel generation of the 1960s are, next to the surrealists, four thinkers who decidedly belong to the revolutionary romantic tradition, and who tried to combine the Marxist and romantic critiques of civilization: Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch. While the first two were popular among French rebels, the third was best known in the United States, while the last had an impact mainly in Germany. Of course, most of the youngsters who went into the streets in Berkeley, Berlin, Milan, Paris, and Mexico City never read these philosophers, but their ideas were diffused in a thousand and one ways in the flyers and slogans of the movement. In France, this applies particularly to Debord and his situationist friends—a dissident branch of surrealists—from whom the imaginary of May ’68 derived some of its most audacious dreams and most striking formulae (“Let imagination seize power!”). However, it is not the “influence” of these thinkers that explains the spirit of ’68 but the other way around: the rebel youths looked for authors who could provide ideas and arguments for their protest and desires. Between them and the movement there was, during the ’60s and early ’70s, a sort of spiritual “elective affinity”: they discovered one another and influenced one another in a process of reciprocal recognition. In his remarkable book on May ’68, Daniel Singer perfectly summarized the meaning of the “events”: “It was a total rebellion questioning not just one aspect of the existing society but both its ends and means. It was a mental revolt against the existing industrial state, both against its capitalist structure and the kind of consumer society it has created. It was coupled with a striking revulsion against anything coming from above, against centralism, authority, the hierarchical order.”4 The “great refusal” (Marcuse’s famous expression, in fact borrowed from Blanchot) of capitalist modernization, of authoritarianism and patriarchy, is one of the main “writings on the wall”—in all the meanings of this expression—of May ’68 in France, along with, probably, its equivalents in the United States, Mexico, Italy, Germany, Brazil, and elsewhere. It should be stressed that the great refusal was not motivated by any crisis of the capitalist economy: on the contrary, those were the high days of the “thirty glorious years” of 21

Surrealism and Revolutionary Romanticism in May ’68

capitalist growth and prosperity. This is important to note in order to avoid falling again into the trap of expecting anticapitalist rebellions only—or mainly—as a result of more or less catastrophic downturns of the capitalist economy. There is no direct correlation between the ups and downs of the stock market and the rise and fall of anticapitalist—or revolutionary—struggles! To believe the contrary would be a regression to the sort of economist “Marxism” that predominated in the Second and Third Internationals. I will limit my comments to the French example, which I know best. If one takes, for instance, the famous flyer distributed in March ’68 by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his friends, “Pourquoi des sociologues?” (Why sociologists?), one finds an outspoken rejection of anything that goes under the label of “modernization,” identified as “planification, rationalization and production of consumer goods according to the economic needs of organized capitalism.”5 Similar railings against industrial techno-bureaucracy, the ideology of progress and rentability, economic-scientific imperatives, and “the laws of science” are pervasive in many student documents from those days. The sociologist Alain Touraine, a critical observer of the movement, takes into account this aspect of May ’68 using Marcusian concepts: “The revolt against the ‘one-dimensionality’ of the industrial society administrated by the economical and political apparatus cannot burst out without having ‘negative’ aspects, i.e. without opposing the immediate pressure of desire to the constraints, allegedly natural, of growth and modernization.”6 To this one should add the protest against the imperialist/colonial wars and a powerful wave of sympathy—not without “romantic” illusions—with the liberation movements in the poor countries of the Third World. And, last but not least, there is, among many of the younger activists, a deep mistrust of the Soviet model, considered as an authoritarian bureaucratic system and, for some, as a variant of the same paradigm of production and consumption prevailing in the capitalist West. The romantic spirit of May ’68 is not only made of “negativity,” of rebellion against an economic, social, and political system considered inhuman, intolerable, oppressive, and philistine, of symbolic acts of protest, such as burning cars, those despised symbols of capitalist commodification and possessive individualism.7 It is also full of utopian hopes, of libertarian and surrealist daydreams, of “explosions of subjectivity” (Luisa Passerini), of what Ernst Bloch called Wunschbilder, images of desire, which are not only projected onto a possible future—an emancipated society, without alienation, reification, social or gender oppression—but immediately attempted in experiments in social practice: the revolutionary movement as collective feast, and as collective creativity in new forms of organization—the attempt to reinvent a free and egalitarian human community, the shared affirmation of one’s subjectivity (particularly among feminists), the discovery of new modes of artistic creation, from subversive and irreverent posters to poetic and ironic writings on the wall. Introductory Essays

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The vindication of the right to subjectivity (Passerini) was linked to the radical anticapitalist thrust that pervaded the spirit of May ’68. This dimension should not be underestimated: it permitted the uneasy alliance between the students, the various Marxist or libertarian “groupuscules,” the new social movements (women’s liberation), and the workers and trade unionists who organized—in spite of their bureaucratic leadership—the biggest general strike in French history. In their important book on the “new spirit of capitalism,” Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello distinguish between two kinds of anticapitalist critique—each one a complex combination of emotions, subjective feelings, indignation, and theoretical analysis—that somehow came together in May ’68: first, social criticism, developed by the traditional labor movement, which denounces the exploitive nature of capitalism, the misery of the dominated classes, and the egoism of the bourgeois oligarchy that confiscates the fruits of progress; and second, artistic critique, a radical challenge to the basic values of capitalism in the name of freedom and authenticity, against a system that produces alienation, disenchantment, and oppression.8 Let us examine in more detail what Boltanksi and Chiapello mean by an “artistic critique” of capitalism: a critique of capitalist disenchantment and inauthenticity, of the misery of daily life, of the dehumanization of the world by technocracy, of authoritarian oppression. Instead of liberating the human potentialities for autonomy, self-organization, and creativity, capitalism submits all individuals to the “iron cage” of instrumental rationality and the mercantile imperatives of commodity production. The expressive forms of this critique are borrowed from the repertory of feast, play, poetry, and “liberation of speech,” while its language is inspired by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and surrealism. It is antimodernist insofar as it insists on disenchantment and yet modernist when it emphasizes liberation. One can find its ideas in the small artistic and political “vanguard groups” of the 1950s—such as “Socialism or Barbarism” (Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort) or situationism (Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem)—before it exploded in the student revolt of May ’68.9 In fact, what Boltanksi and Chiapello call “artistic” is essentially what I refer to as the “romantic” critique of capitalism. The main difference is that they attempt to explain it as a “bohemian style of life” through the feelings of artists and dandies, as best formulated in the writings of Baudelaire.10 This seems to me a much too narrow approach: what I call romantic anticapitalism is not only much older but has a much broader social background. It is rooted among artists, intellectuals, women, students, and all kinds of social groups whose lifestyles and cultures are negatively affected by the destructive process of capitalist modernization. The other problematic aspect of Boltanski and Chiapello’s otherwise outstanding and foundational work is their attempt to demonstrate that the “artistic critique,” separating 23

Surrealism and Revolutionary Romanticism in May ’68

itself from the social one, became integrated and co-opted (récupéré) by the new spirit of capitalism through its new style of management, based on the principles of flexibility, greater autonomy in work, more creativity, less discipline of labor, and less authoritarianism. A new social elite, often active in the ’60s and attracted to the “artistic critique,” broke with the social critique of capitalism—considered “archaic” and associated with the old Communist Left—and joined the system in managerial roles.11 There is much truth in this picture, but rather than a smooth continuity between the rebels of ’68 and the new managers, or between the desires and utopias of May and the latest capitalist ideology, I see a deep ethical and political gap (sometimes in the life of the same individuals). What has been lost in the process is not some detail but the main point: once divested of its anticapitalist content, the “artistic,” or romantic, critique of capitalism ceases to exist, loses any meaning, and becomes a mere ornament. Of course, capitalist ideology can integrate “artistic” and “romantic” elements in its discourse, but they have been emptied of any concrete social significance and perform only as advertisement. There is very little in common between the new industrial “flexibility” and the libertarian utopian dreams of ’68. To speak, as Boltanksi and Chiapello do, of “capitalisme gauchiste” is pure nonsense, a contradictio in adjecto. What, then, is the heritage of ’68 today? While I can agree with those who claim that the movement has been thoroughly defeated, that many of its participants and leaders have become conformists, and that capitalism—in its neoliberal form—emerged in the 1980s and ’90s not only as triumphant but as the only possible economic system, I would argue that we are seeing, in the past few years, the upsurge worldwide of a broad new social movement with a strong anticapitalist component. Of course, history never repeats itself, and it would be vain and absurd to expect a “new May ’68” in Paris or elsewhere: each new rebel generation has its own unique combination of desires, utopias, and subjectivity. The international mobilization against neoliberal globalization—Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados—inspired by the principle that “the world is not a commodity” is very different from the movements of the ’60s. It is far from being homogeneous: while its more moderate participants still believe in the possibility of regulating the system, a large section of the movement—well beyond its organized Marxist or libertarian components—is outspokenly anticapitalist, and in its protest we can find a combination of the romantic and Marxist critique of the capitalist order, of its social injustice and mercantile greed, reminiscent of ’68. One can already perceive not only analogies with the ’60s—the strong anti-authoritarian, or libertarian, tendency—but also some important differences: the ecological and feminist dimensions, incipient in May ’68, are now key components of the new radical culture, while the illusions about “really existing socialism” (whether Soviet, Chinese, or other) have practically disappeared. Introductory Essays

24

Fig. I.6  Bruno Barbey, France, Paris, May 13, 1968. Demonstration with students mocking the police uniform. Protest dummy by surrealist Jean Benoît. Photo: Bruno Barbey / Magnum Photos.

This movement is only beginning, and it is impossible to predict how it will evolve, but it has already changed the intellectual and political climate in several countries. It is realistic; that is, it demands the impossible. Members of the Paris Surrealist Group were present in many rebellious actions, but as individuals or in artworks (e.g., Jean Benoît’s effigy of a police officer during the May ’68 protests in Paris—fig. I.6) rather than as a collective. Will surrealism become a living political or cultural reference for the future emancipatory movements, as it was in the 1960s? History does not repeat itself, but one cannot exclude the possibility of interesting surprises. Notes 1. LaCoss, “Dreams of Arson.” 2. Passerini, “‘Utopia’ and Desire,” 12–13. 3. I have developed this interpretation of romanticism in my book with Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. 4. Singer, Prelude to Revolution, 21.

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5. Cohn-Bendit et al., “Pourquoi des sociologues?” 6. Touraine, Mouvement de mai, 224. See also the insightful essay by Feenberg, “Remembering the May Events.” 7. On the automobile as an “incomparable and perhaps irreparable instrument of deculturation, Surrealism and Revolutionary Romanticism in May ’68

of internal destruction of the civilized world,” see Lefebvre, Position: Contre les technocrates, 14. 8. Boltanski and Chiapello, Nouvel esprit du capitalisme, 244–45.

9. Ibid., 245–46. 10. Ibid., 63–84. 11. Ibid., 283–87.

Bibliography Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, Jean-Pierre Duteuil, Bertrand Gérard, and Bernard Granautier. “Pourquoi des sociologues?” Esprit, May 1968. https://​ esprit​.presse​.fr​/article​/cohn​-bendit​-daniel​ -et​-duteuil​-jean​-pierre​-et​-gerard​-bertrand​ -et​-granautier​-bernard​/pourquoi​-des​ -sociologues​-24493. Feenberg, Andrew. “Remembering the May Events.” Theory and Society 6, no. 1 (1978): 29–53. LaCoss, Donald. “Dreams of Arson and the Arson of Dreams: Surrealism in ’68.” Critical Legal Thinking, January 12, 2011. https://​ criticallegalthinking​.com​/2011​/01​/12​/dreams​

Introductory Essays

-of​-arson​-the​-arson​-of​-dreams​-surrealism​ -in​-68. Lefebvre, Henri. Position: Contre les technocrates. Paris: Éditions Gonthier, 1967. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Translated by Catherine Porter. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Passerini, Luisa. “‘Utopia’ and Desire.” Thesis Eleven 68, no. 1 (2002): 11–30. Singer, Daniel. Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968. New York: Hill and Wang, 1970. Touraine, Alain. Le Mouvement de mai ou le communisme utopique. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1969.

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“Down with Art, Up with Revolution” Protesting Dada and Surrealism in 1968

Sandra Zalman

1.

“In the beginning there were cops. Squads of them, platoons of them, cops in helmets, cops in paddy wagons, cops lining the sawhorse barricades along 53rd Street, cops in plain clothes and full dress, cops by the dozen, the score, the hundred. ‘Oh my God,’ a woman with a poodle gasped. ‘What’s going to happen now?’”1 So begins the Village Voice’s description of the protest that took place at the opening preview of the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage at the Museum of Modern Art on March 25, 1968 (fig. 1.1).2 The exhibition, organized by William Rubin in his new role as curator of the MoMA, instantly became a literal and figurative site of opposition. Demonstrators threw stink bombs outside the museum, taunting guests and holding signs that opposed surrealism’s institutionalization. The protesters’ malodorous objections were numerous. Their signs—“This Is a Money Circus,” “Down with Art, Up with Revolution,” and “Surrealism Means Revolution, Not Spectator Sports”—argued that Dada and surrealism were movements of the streets, not to be co-opted by—and embalmed in—the museum. But they also disputed the surrealist artists’ own commitment to revolt, pointing out the irony of surrealism’s absorption by the establishment and labeling the entire event a “Bourgeois Zoo.”

This chapter deals with the countercultural response to the institutionalization of Dada and surrealism in American museums in 1968. Despite the charged cultural atmosphere of the 1960s, which made such historical art relevant once more, Rubin, in his presentation of the work, discarded the revolutionary agendas that had been central to Dada and surrealist activity. Described in the press as a group of hippies, the protesters used the exhibition as a platform to express their dissatisfaction not only with the current state of avant-garde art but also with American politics, particularly the war in Vietnam—an effigy of Johnson was burned at the scene. The exhibition became a rallying point, opening up artistic discourse to push surrealism to the forefront of ideological debates over modern art—the role of institutions, politics, elite and popular culture—in

Fig. 1.1  Protest of the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 25, 1968. Photo: Jerry Engel / New York Post Archives / © NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images.

large part because the exhibition inadvertently demonstrated surrealism’s usefulness as a model for subverting authoritarianism. Already a diffuse movement splintered by divergent styles and philosophies, surrealism offered a platform for 1960s audiences to reignite the relationship between art and culture. It is difficult to establish exactly what transpired outside MoMA during the March 25 protest, as newspaper and eyewitness accounts offer contradictory versions of the event. Between one hundred and three hundred demonstrators arrived, and a larger number of police officers prepared to greet them. Newspaper reports ascribed various levels of coherence to the demonstrators’ demands and objections. The account in the Village Voice was perhaps the most sympathetic to the activists’ cause, reporting that one young man had shouted, “We’re not here for a happening. We’re here to protest the destruction 31

“Down with Art, Up with Revolution”

of surrealism and the mockery made of it by that building over there [MoMA]. Dada is revolution. It stands for everything that the museum is against. For everything these rich museum-goers are against.” Noting the origins of Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire in Switzerland during World War I, some of the protesters even considered the historical irony that the “Zurich police were much more concerned about the strange goings-on at the Cabaret Voltaire than they were about the activities of the quiet, studious Russian who spent his afternoons in the library.”3 That unobtrusive Russian was of course Vladimir Lenin, who lived in an apartment only a few blocks from Dada’s birthplace and headquarters. The New York Times quoted another protester, José Arguelles, then an instructor in art history at Princeton University, who said, “We’re carrying on the spirit of dada by being here instead of in the museum. Dada and surrealism are art that’s really happening in life, not in museums. We don’t want violence, but we’re part of a spiritual and cultural revolution that’s going on all over the world.”4 For many of the demonstrators, the politics of historicization were the true stakes of the debate. Nearly all the protesters seemed to believe that institutionalizing Dada and surrealism by sequestering these movements in a museum was a way of closing off their continued relevance for artists and activists of the 1960s. Gavin Grindon has described how younger artists, like the group Black Mask, joined in the protests because they recognized that Dada and surrealism offered a platform for activist art.5 It did not help that Rubin’s approach to displaying Dada and surrealism was influenced by his stylistic understanding of modern art. But in some ways it did not matter what the exhibition actually looked like, since none of the protesters would have seen it prior to protesting. Once the exhibition was open to the public, critics immediately noted that MoMA’s presentation denied the potential for an experiential understanding of surrealism. Instead of drawing from the disruptive display techniques of previous surrealist exhibitions, Rubin took a diligent, didactic approach to his subject. (This was partly because Duchamp had declined Rubin’s suggestion that he install his own galleries, thereby rejecting the possibility of reprising the looping twine that had obscured artworks in the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition of 1942.) Each work was installed straightforwardly and arranged methodically, without reference to the surrealist exhibition practices of the 1930s and 1940s, which were designed to challenge, rather than facilitate, the audience’s capacity to view (fig. 1.2). On the one hand, conservative critics like Hilton Kramer praised Rubin for “attempt[ing] to penetrate the rhetoric, the politics, and the legends of dada and surrealism—all the extra-esthetic baggage that contribute to their beguiling mystique—in order to disclose their durable esthetic substance.”6 On the other hand, these were the very aspects that made surrealism’s concerns so widely relevant to contemporary culture.

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Fig. 1.2  Installation view of the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 27–May 12, 1968. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

In part, Dada’s and surrealism’s extra-aesthetic (even anti-aesthetic) aspirations meant that museum exhibitions would inherently contradict their artistic and social ideals. As Peter Bürger would later write, “art as an institution prevents the contents of works that press for radical change in society . . . from having any practical effect.”7 Philip Leider, editor at the formalist-influenced magazine Artforum, though praising the exhibition, admitted, “The surrealist ‘objects,’ for example, are embalmed in a manner corroborating the worst fears of the protesting Hippies—as befits what is deadest in surrealism. The worst of them are hardest to get to, awkwardly stuck in the far corner of a narrow mausoleum of a room.”8 While belittling the legitimacy of such a concern, Kramer also acknowledged as much, writing, “No doubt for the partisans of the surrealist movement, who continue to speak of ‘revolution’ as if it were a dinner party that still might take place,

33

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such artistic accomplishments do little to assuage the bitterness they feel at the perfidy of history—history, which promised so much and which has ended up as an exhibition in a museum.”9 This was indeed the major objection the protesters had raised on opening night and one they hoped the demonstration would change. When movements pertain to life and culture the way that Dada and surrealism do, another reviewer wrote, “there is an ironic significance in the fact that the boisterous, anti-esthetic, prodigal sons have now come home to rest on the great mothering breast of the Museum of Modern Art.”10 Rubin, in fact, recognized this irony as well but in reverse, noting that “there’s a further irony . . . and that is that not only is there a great deal of dada and surrealist art that really stacks up as art, despite the fact that the intention was essentially elsewhere, but that it even looks arty! . . . Arty is not the same thing as art. It means self-consciously art-like.”11 Rubin was less surprised by the establishment’s absorption of Dada and surrealism (indeed, he was actively participating in it) than by his recognition that Dada and surrealist work resembled the very idea of art that its practitioners had eschewed. Rubin also recognized that, unlike other artists, the Dadaists and surrealists were more committed to action than to objects, describing Dada and surrealism as “life movements, or philosophical movements, movements that were really more interested in poetry, psychology, politics, action on various levels, than specifically in works of art. The works of art were incidental, but after all, action disappears into history. The only thing that remains that is concrete are the works of art.”12 Even as he recognized these crucial elements of Dada and surrealism, Rubin was largely unconcerned with aestheticizing the Dadaists and surrealists’ sociopolitical efforts. A reporter in Chicago unknowingly echoed Rubin’s notion when he wrote, “The irony of the whole dada-surrealism thing is that an iconoclastic attack on the very basics of art produced several art works of lasting interest and importance.”13 While the protesters outside MoMA in 1968 could and did recognize a fraught kinship with the movement, in no small part because the cultural climate of the late 1960s—including the protests over the war in Vietnam, civil rights, workers’ rights, free speech—was deeply politicized, surrealism’s own political affiliations and involvements were hardly mentioned in the exhibition. Indeed, the protest on the street outside MoMA was more than tinged with political allegations, as the demonstrators staged a mimed drama that satirized US involvement in Vietnam: “It featured a white-fanged dragon— the war—devouring a US soldier and a player representing President Johnson counting endless piles of outsize dollars.”14 (This was just before Johnson announced that he would not be seeking reelection.) This aspect of the demonstration had little to do with the art on display, but the antiwar spirit of Dada and surrealism was very much in evidence on the street outside. Though Harold Rosenberg wrote that “Surrealist thinking is omnipresent in the thought of the [May ’68] uprising” in Paris, and one critic wrote of Dada’s

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and surrealism’s acute “similarity [to] current doctrines expressed by Senators Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, multitudes of college students, flower children, and increasingly larger segments of the population,” surrealism’s commitment to ultraleft political views was not often mentioned.15 This was probably a residual effect of Rubin’s formalist curatorial impulse—the overt mixing of politics and art would inherently undermine any claim to art’s autonomy. The movement’s historical allegiance to Marxism would have to be buried if surrealism was to conform to the version of modern art then espoused by MoMA. Yet Rubin privately played up the museum audience’s politically engaged views in a letter to a lender to the exhibition: “I know that Picasso has an attitude full of reservation towards America, considering the politics governing our country. Perhaps he would have a more favorable attitude if you could explain to him that the direction of the exhibition is in the hands of a young person and that our audience is an audience of young people and young artists, having an idea on the war in Vietnam very different than the official politics.”16 Rubin was thirty-nine years old at the time. To another European, Rubin stressed that “the people who are organizing this exhibition, the artists for whom it will be very important, and the public which could not have seen the 1937 exhibition are all younger people whose views on most of these issues are probably much closer to Picasso’s than to that of the American Government.”17 In its popularity, particularly with this younger generation, the exhibition—even in its neutered context—was recognized as an important site of contemporary subculture. As the reviewer for Time magazine pointed out, “dada’s pranks and surrealist spectacles were revived in the 1960s as Happenings, which in turn have been commercialized by department stores, and ultimately popularized by flower children as love-ins.”18 Despite the objections of the demonstrators on opening night, Dada and surrealism were essential cultural references for the young radicals whose attendance at the exhibition nonetheless implicitly endorsed the museum’s “stabilization” (to use Bürger’s term) of Dada and surrealism as aestheticized historical movements.19 The widespread popularity of the exhibition became its own point of interest for reviewers. According to one report, “3,562 paying visitors . . . crowded into the museum for opening day, March 27. The next day the throng seemed even larger and more diversified: young, old; beat and otherwise, especially otherwise.”20 Another reviewer observed that “gallery visitors in psychedelic miniskirts, hippie unhaircuts, and what passes for an intellectual look are sometimes closer to surrealism than the art.”21 The writer recognized that surrealist attitudes might better be embodied by the younger generation that visited the exhibition than by the decades-old objects on display, though, significantly, artists like Tanguy and Magritte were represented by their older work as well as by recent paintings made in the 1950s and 1960s. Critic Max Kozloff made a common connection,

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writing, “this is a skeptical, anti-mystical age, replete, moreover, with such conditions as pot, and LSD, which can furnish a poor man’s surrealism.”22 Beyond the resemblance of the new psychedelic imagery to certain surrealist paintings, the visual correlation between surrealism and the burgeoning drug culture is worth elaborating. In 1966, a special issue of Life magazine devoted to LSD featured a spread that offered a photographic illustration of a bad trip.23 The series was composed of close-up photographs of a teenage girl writhing on the floor, in some images covering her eyes or mouth with her hands or chewing on her fingers. The similarity to the photographic spread commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Charcot’s discovery of hysteria that had appeared in La révolution surréaliste in 1928 is striking. In calling hysteria the “greatest poetic discovery of the end of the 19th century,”24 the surrealists André Breton and Louis Aragon sounded very much like proponents of LSD who described the drug as “the psychic revolution of man.”25 Life magazine credited surrealism in a 1967 issue: “There is a procession of art movements reaching back 50 years that invented every major Underground idea including the obsession with visionary drugs: the dadaists, the surrealists and the Beat generation said it all. But none could have guessed at the size of the audience the Underground presently commands, the strange new turnings of ‘in group’ taste. . . . But there remains the large and growing number of young people who are simply hanging around the Underground’s permissive edges, using drugs to calm whirlwind confusions, to make the sun keep coming up.”26 Again and again, surrealism was depicted as being for the people, making it one of the very few avant-gardes to be, if not understood by, at least relevant to a cross section of an international and transgenerational public. As the exhibition traveled across the country, the tone of many reviews shifted along with the darkening cultural climate. A critic for the Los Angeles Examiner wrote, “we now live in an age of dada and surrealism. We get diagrams of acid stomachs while eating dinner and cops clouting students, photographed live. Later we go see Bonnie and Clyde’s death agonies and blood. ‘Blowing the mind’ with drugs is common.”27 Dada and surrealism seemed to anticipate a sardonic acceptance of the irrationality of contemporary culture. A reviewer in Chicago also recognized a shift in the cultural landscape: “You will find they [students of the 1960s] understand Duchamp, if anything, better than you do. . . . The angrily rebellious nonsense of dada, the impossible but seductive marvels of surrealism, and the underlying blind disquietude of both, are woven into the psychological fabric of the present day. There is something immensely appealing about them to a generation much surer of what is wrong and meaningless than what is right and meaningful.”28 By 1968, most reviewers recognized a split between the sincere, forthright art of the 1950s and a new 1960s sensibility. When Rubin’s Dada and surrealism show arrived at its final venue, the Art Institute of Chicago, in the fall of 1968, the exhibition just missed coinciding with the violence Surrealist Solidarity

36

that erupted at the Democratic National Convention held in the city at the end of August. The riots at the convention, which took place at the Hilton Hotel a few blocks from the Art Institute, prompted Barnett Newman to withdraw his work from the exhibition’s Chicago iteration. Writing to the Art Institute’s director, Newman explained that the removal of his work would “express my feelings concerning the actions of Mayor Daley, feeble as this gesture may be.”29 Several reviews of Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage in Chicago contextualized the movements in light of the city’s recent encounter with politicized violence, invoking the historical avant-garde in a visceral way: “The heritage of Dada—and to a lesser extent the surrealist dreamers—is not just the ‘art-art’ which resulted from their ‘anti-art’ posture. It is the scream and the cry, the mobs in the street, the shouted obscenity, the long hair, and the new blue jeans dreams.”30 Another reviewer noted the parallels between the pacifists of different eras, writing that the exhibition “firmly (if unintentionally) connects the anti-war, anti-bourgeois revulsion of the summer of 1968 with similar emotions during and immediately after World War I.”31 The installation of Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage in Chicago also prompted local members of the Chicago Surrealist Group to organize a protest at the opening and mount a “counter-exhibition” at their own Gallery Bugs Bunny to demonstrate that surrealism was alive and well. (On display in that exhibition were works by Penelope Rosemont; the Rosemonts had also been active in distributing surrealist literature to the antiwar crowds at the convention.) The surrealist group in Chicago made a hand-lettered poster to advertise the show, in which they clarified, “Our aim is not the creation of ‘Art’ but the total liberation of man.”32 While finding fault with Rubin’s exhibition, a Chicago Tribune review of the Bugs Bunny show took issue with the organizers’ claims that Rubin used “works by surrealists of the previous generation to weaken the liberating research and revolutionary combat of surrealists here and now.”33 Instead, the reviewer saw the Bugs Bunny show as a useful addition to Rubin’s historical exhibition. The counterexhibition organized by these local surrealists was a small success, garnering press coverage and increased visibility for the group.34 Gene Swenson, the critic who had organized the MoMA demonstration, would probably have been gratified by the Chicago surrealists’ attempts to amplify surrealism’s social aims. Swenson continued to advocate for art’s political engagement in the New York Free Press: “The New York art world is sitting on a time bomb of social revolution. Rumors, reinforced by events such as the massive police demonstration at the recent opening of the Dada and Surrealism show at the Modern Museum, have been spread that America is facing a social revolution of some sort.”35 Swenson believed that institutions like MoMA should foster radical dialogue by displaying work that actively engaged social issues. Sometime in March 1968, Swenson submitted a text to MoMA, again proposing that contemporary art must engage contemporary culture: “I don’t believe art can save 37

“Down with Art, Up with Revolution”

Fig. 1.3  Gregory Battcock, “Museum of Modern Art Hires Guards to Keep Swenson Out,” New York Free Press, February 29, 1968. Gregory Battcock papers, 1952–ca. 1980. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

us as a nation, but I do believe that we are not producing the kind of artists we should at this supreme if agonizing moment in this nation’s history. This should be America’s golden age—and who do they call our greatest artists? Noland and Stella. . . . Well I don’t believe it.”36 For Swenson, Kenneth Noland’s and Frank Stella’s hard-edged abstraction posited art as an insular endeavor concerned purely with painterly processes. Swenson led a group calling itself “The Transformation,” which wrote a letter to Bates Lowry, MoMA’s director, informing him (somewhat disingenuously), “We wish to emphasize that this celebration will be peaceful and is in no way hostile or antagonistic to the interest of the Museum.”37 The following day, the museum received a phone call from the police inspector in the eighteenth precinct to whom “The Transformation” had applied for the permit to demonstrate. According to J. M. Chapman, who wrote an internal museum memo regarding the phone call, “Mr. Kelly [the inspector] asked our opinion of this group and stated that he would deny the permit if we opposed its issuance. I advised him we had no opposition to declare.”38 MoMA did not feel threatened by Swenson’s plans and allowed them to proceed. Swenson had already been picketing MoMA for at least a month before the protest (fig. 1.3).39 During these daily pickets (from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.), Swenson carried a large cardboard question mark to signify, as critic Gregory Battcock interpreted it, an existential uncertainty—“everything is question and in question.”40 This is why the historicization of Dada and surrealism—as the period at the end of the art-historical sentence rather than the question mark—riled so many. As John Perreault wrote in the Village Voice, “perhaps the easiest way to kill them [Dada and surrealism] off and erase the threat is to mount a huge howl of undeniable quality—in terms of individual works—but Surrealist Solidarity

38

which in its cumulative effect is ultra-conservative and seems to imply (1) that it’s all been done before, kids, so don’t waste your time with the same old song and dance; (2) dada and surrealism are only important because individual artists, often without knowing it, produced individual works of lasting importance and ‘value’; and (3) it all leads up to Abstract Expressionism anyway.”41 Perreault accused Rubin of marshaling Dada and surrealism into a proscribed narrative of art history while draining the originality from contemporary art. Rubin took Perreault’s critique to heart, writing him a lengthy letter in reply in which he described the complications of the exhibition: “These works still contain a challenge to the nature of art and of experience (as does any ‘living’ art of the past), but quite obviously the politics of the twenties and thirties are irrelevant today. . . . We live in a culture where ‘packaging’ has become, on every level of activity, more important than the thing packaged, and where the museum world has been undermined by constant concessions to show biz pizzazz; I admit to having opted for the simple expedient of choosing the best work and letting it speak directly.”42 When Rubin asserted that the politics of the 1920s and ’30s were irrelevant to 1968, he was speaking very narrowly. The surrealists’ more general Marxist principles—especially the idea of rebelling against mainstream bourgeois culture—were clearly Fig. 1.4  Illustration of William Rubin, New in play in the political climate of the 1960s. York Free Press, April 4, 1968. And Rubin’s larger point—that the packaging had become more interesting than the thing packaged—already implies a certain regret at the capitalist interests governing American culture, even as Rubin excused his decision not to enter into “an extended discussion of Communism” in either the exhibition or its catalog.43 An arresting collage of Rubin, accompanying a review in the New York Free Press, illustrates the bifurcated position in which the curator found himself (fig. 1.4).44 It shows a formal photograph of Rubin’s head combined with a drawing of his body as a besuited mermaid.45 He sits on a seashell that rests on what seems to be a hardwood floor, while the exterior of MoMA’s building recedes in the background. Rubin, though his gaze is 39

“Down with Art, Up with Revolution”

unfixed, stares in the direction of the museum, his sights set upon this prototypic cube, but the seriousness of his enterprise is undermined by the simplicity of the linear drawing and his own transcorporeality (from photograph to drawing and from human to fish). Rubin occupies a strange no-man’s-land; neither in the museum nor (necessarily) outside it, he is truly a fish out of water. In some ways, the collage illustrates exactly the repression of the romantic, the fantastic, and the psychological that remain submerged under the museum’s modernist façade of seemingly objective values. The image gestures to surrealist strategies, transforming the curator into a creature reminiscent of an exquisite corpse. The difficulty that Dada and surrealism presented to both the counterculture and the establishment demonstrated that unless the modern art narrative could take into account the full range of these movements as visual and sociopolitical strategies, that narrative risked obsolescence. As a representative of the institution, Rubin felt that the writing of history was a necessary and responsible approach to contextualizing Dada’s and surrealism’s aesthetic contributions. But activists and critics pointed out that MoMA’s attempt to institute value, to canonize certain artists like Miró, or to mold Dada and surrealism into a clear art-historical lineage, erased their dynamics as movements founded on the idea of social and political disruption. Where Rubin wanted to be circumspect and specific, the protesters insisted on messy generality. If Rubin implied that contemporary art need not repeat the Dada and surrealist experiments of the past, the protesters felt that they were losing the open-ended invitation to be aesthetically and culturally irreverent that the Dada and surrealist precedent had seemed to secure. More dangerous still, as MoMA inadvertently certified that the avant-garde had become the academy, perhaps “the idea of wrecking tradition has become one of the major sustaining traditions of our time.”46 MoMA’s benign presentation of Dada and surrealism showed that if dissent and revolution could be so readily assimilated by the establishment, then the very premise of the avant-garde might ultimately be toothless. And yet it was precisely the exhibition’s conventional, seemingly neutral packaging that galvanized the revolt to return Dada’s and surrealism’s revolutionary character to center stage, challenging—once again—the prevailing understanding of modern art. Notes 1. Whelton, “Oh Dada, Poor Dada.” 2. This chapter expands upon ideas I first introduced in my book Consuming Surrealism. 3. Whelton, “Oh Dada, Poor Dada.” 4. Glueck, “Hippies Protest at Dada Preview.” 5. See Grindon, “Poetry Written in Gasoline.” 6. Kramer, “Mark of the Infidel.” For Kramer, it was not that Rubin had turned his back on the revolutionary history of Dada and surrealism, Surrealist Solidarity

but rather that “history itself has disclosed Dada and Surrealism to be, despite all the hopes and protestations to the contrary, primarily movements of esthetic thought and artistic accomplishment.” 7. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 95. 8. Leider, “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage,” 23. 9. Kramer, “Mark of the Infidel.” 10. Mellow, “Exquisite Corpses.” 40

11. Rubin, “Camera III,” recording no. 68.12, part 1, MoMA Archives, New York. 12. William Rubin, interview by Ruth Bowman, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 13. Baker, “Protesters of Dada Show.” 14. Dominion, “Irate Hippies Lecture New York Police.” The mime show was also reported in Feurey and Levin, “Hippies Put on a Museum Show.” 15. Rosenberg continued, “It is the Surrealist idea, detached from Surrealist art, that links the uprising to art history, as it is Marxist thinking, detached from Marxist organization, that links the uprising to the history of Socialism. . . . In the Paris uprising, . . . Surrealism, laced with Dada, suddenly reappeared as an intellectual force independent of its past creations.” Rosenberg, “Surrealism in the Streets,” 54. See also Harris, “4 Major Manhattan Museum Shows.” 16. William Rubin to Louise Leiris, June 1, 1967, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files, MoMA Archives, New York. My translation from the French. 17. William Rubin to Jean Leymarie, January 3, 1967, ibid. 18. Time, “Hobbyhorse Rides Again,” 84. 19. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 96. 20. McNaspy, “Dada and Lively Church Music.” 21. News Advocate, “Brushed with Dada.” 22. Kozloff, “Surrealist Painting Re-examined,” 9. 23. Schiller, “Teen-Age LSD User.” 24. Quoted in Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, 206. 25. Farrell, “Scientists, Theologians, Mystics,” 31D. 26. Farrell, “Other Culture,” 96. 27. Millier, review of Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage. 28. Schultze, “Big Dada.” 29. Barnett Newman to C. C. Cunningham, October 7, 1968, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files, Art Institute of Chicago Archives. 30. Willis, “When Art Is Gagged.” 31. Auer, “Four Decades of Dada.”

32. Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 1968, file 10–16, box 10A, James Speyer Records, Art Institute of Chicago Archives. 33. Ibid. Also quoted in Baker, “Protesters of Dada Show.” 34. For more on the Gallery Bugs Bunny, see LaCoss, “Dreams of Arson.” See also Rosemont, Rosemont, and Garon, Forecast Is Hot. 35. Swenson, “Corporate Structure.” 36. Gene Swenson, “Question Mark,” PASTA 9 files, MoMA Archives, New York. 37. “The Transformation” to Bates Lowry, March 19, 1968, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files, MoMA Archives, New York. 38. J. M. Chapman, memo to René d’Harnoncourt, Richard Koch, William Rubin, Bates Lowry, Elizabeth Shaw, Security, March 20, 1968, ibid. 39. Critic Gregory Battcock, reporting on Swenson’s protest in the New York Free Press, noted that the museum’s use of guards implied that “the museum today is an art bank. . . . As a rule they [the guards] protect the viewers from the art, which is often threatening, frequently provocative and sometimes shattering to the prevailing value structure.” Battcock, “Museum of Modern Art Hires Guards.” 40. Ibid. 41. Perreault, “More Dada Than Dada,” 17. 42. William Rubin to John Perreault, April 17, 1968, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition files, MoMA Archives, New York. Rubin sent a copy of his response to Perreault to Philip Leider when Leider asked him to write a commentary on critical reaction to the show. Rubin wrote, “I thought it might interest you to see a letter which I sent to Perreault who wrote a far more serious review than Harold [Rosenberg]’s.” Rubin to Leider, May 22, 1968, ibid. 43. Rubin to Perreault, April 17, 1968. 44. Battcock, “Review.” 45. The photo seems to have been taken from the New York Times article announcing Rubin’s appointment as MoMA curator. See Glueck, “Museum Chooses Head.” 46. Schultze, “Big Dada.”

Bibliography Ades, Dawn. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978. Auer, James. “Four Decades of Dada, Surrealism at Chicago.” Post-Crescent (Appleton, WI), October 27, 1968.

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Baker, Robb. “Protesters of Dada Show Make Ironic Contribution.” Chicago Tribune, November 27, 1968. Battcock, Gregory. “Museum of Modern Art Hires Guards to Keep Swenson Out.” New York Free Press, February 29, 1968.

“Down with Art, Up with Revolution”

———. “Review: ‘Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage’ and ‘Exhibition of Destructive Art.’” New York Free Press, April 4, 1968. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Dominion (Wellington, NZ). “Irate Hippies Lecture New York Police.” March 27, 1968. PI.II.A.291, MoMA Archives, New York. Farrell, Barry. “The Other Culture.” Life, February 17, 1967, 87–102. ———. “Scientists, Theologians, Mystics Swept Up in a Psychic Revolution.” Life, March 25, 1966, 30D–31D. Feurey, Joseph, and Jay Levin. “Hippies Put on a Museum Show.” New York Post, March 26, 1968. Glueck, Grace. “Hippies Protest at Dada Preview.” New York Times, March 26, 1968. ———. “Museum Chooses Head for Division.” New York Times, July 11, 1967. Grindon, Gavin. “Poetry Written in Gasoline: Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker.” Art History 38, no. 1 (2015): 170–209. Harris, Bob. “4 Major Manhattan Museum Shows.” Long Island Daily Review, April 4, 1968. Kozloff, Max. “Surrealist Painting Re-examined.” Artforum, September 1966, 5–9. Kramer, Hilton. “The Mark of the Infidel.” New York Times, April 7, 1968. LaCoss, Donald. “Dreams of Arson and the Arson of Dreams: Surrealism in ’68.” Critical Legal Thinking, January 12, 2011. https://​ criticallegalthinking​.com​/2011​/01​/12​/dreams​ -of​-arson​-the​-arson​-of​-dreams​-surrealism​ -in​-68. Leider, Philip. “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage.” Artforum, May 1968, 22–23. McNaspy, C. J. “Dada and Lively Church Music.” America, April 27, 1968.

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Mellow, James R. “The Exquisite Corpses.” New Leader, April 8, 1968. PI.II.A.288, MoMA Archives, New York. Millier, Arthur. Review of Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage. Los Angeles Examiner, July 14, 1968. News Advocate (Manistee, MI). “Brushed with Dada.” October 2, 1968. Perreault, John. “More Dada Than Dada?” Village Voice, April 11, 1968, 16–17. Rosemont, Franklin, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon, eds. The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts and Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, 1966–1976. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997. Rosenberg, Harold. “Surrealism in the Streets.” New Yorker, December 28, 1968, 52–55. Rubin, William. Interview by Ruth Gurin Bowman. WNYC Radio, January 3, 1968. NYPR Archive Collections. https://​www​.wnyc​.org​/story ​/william​-rubin. Schiller, Lawrence. “A Teen-Age LSD User Meets Terror on a Bad Trip.” Life, March 25, 1966, 30B–30C. Schultze, Franze. “Big Dada.” Chicago Daily News, October 19, 1968. Swenson, Gene. “The Corporate Structure of the American Art World.” New York Free Press, April 25, 1968. Time. “The Hobbyhorse Rides Again.” April 5, 1968, 84. Whelton, Clark. “Oh Dada, Poor Dada, MoMA’s Hanging You.” Village Voice, March 28, 1968, 12. Willis, Thomas. “When Art Is Gagged, the Flavor Is Gone.” Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1968. Zalman, Sandra. Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015.

42

Ted Joans, the Other Jones

Jazz Poet, Black Power Missionary, and Surrealist Interpreter

Grégory Pierrot

2.

When NYU organized the first Beat conference in 1994 (featuring usual suspects Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Ann Waldman, and others), Ted Joans—who had not been invited—had to crash the party to get his due. Prompted to stand up during the Q&A, Joans introduced himself timidly as the “Crispus Attucks of the beat generation.”1 Nineteen years after his death in 2003, when the “nomad with words” is mentioned at all, he is generally placed among the Beats, but often to the detriment of his other literary and cultural allegiances, including not just his engagement with African American culture in general and with Black Power in particular, but also his dedication to surrealism.2 Early in his life, Joans found in surrealism a personal tool for survival in white supremacist America and “the magical vital miraculous weapon needed in liberating human Beings.”3 This movement from the individual to the collective, turning self-defense into a weapon of mass instruction, arguably culminated in Joans’s output during the Black Power era. Joans heard the most concrete and perhaps the earliest evidence of the rise of Black Power in the groundbreaking sounds of the “New Thing,” the no-holds-barred free jazz played by the likes of Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor. Yet while his Greenwich Village comrade in arms, LeRoi Jones—“the king,” as Joans called him in a poem—was making a name for himself as the defender of free jazz and standard bearer of the Black Arts Movement in the United States, Joans, exiled from the country, acted in a similar capacity in that “antique dull cemetery” of Europe.4 There, standing as he did at the crossroad where African American experience and Black artistic expression met the European cultural and political avant-garde, Joans made it his purpose for a time to proselytize for Black liberation, using surrealism as a means of translating Black Power to audiences around the world.

Ted Joans’s Double Birth Analytical studies of Joans’s work routinely say more about his life than about his writings. Arguably, this is a function of Joans’s artistic practice: his visual art and poetry are virtually inseparable from his (very public) private life. His biography might go something like this. Born Theodore Jones in Cairo, Illinois, on July 4, 1928, Joans received his early artistic education under the double sun of jazz and surrealism. Music was omnipresent in his household, as his parents performed on river boats, and he later worked as a stagehand in vaudeville theaters in Kentucky and Indiana, where the cream of 1940s jazz musicians came to play.5 His introduction to surrealism came by way of his aunt, who worked as a domestic for a wealthy white family whose old magazines and books she would bring home to Ted, notably “the November 1933 issue of Vogue, with an article about Salvador Dali discussing surrealism, the special number of L’Illustration on the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition, copies of Le Minotaure.”6 Surrealist visual art specifically made a strong impression on him, influencing him to study art in college. While a student at Indiana, he changed his name to Joans, in honor of a woman named Joan, his “muse at that developing decade,” but also in order to make his name more memorable.7 In 1951, Joans moved to Greenwich Village, where he became a fixture of overlapping art scenes. He befriended Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionist artists, and he patronized the Village’s jazz spots with Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Soon Joans opened Galerie Fantastique, an art space where he organized exhibitions, happenings, and parties and first met fellow African American Beat writer LeRoi Jones, who arrived in the Village in 1954.8 As Joans’s friends encouraged him to write, his poetry gradually became as important as his painting. He developed a jazz-imbued style of poetic performance owing as much to bebop improvisation and Beat antics as to jazz poetry pioneer Langston Hughes and Jones, whose own effort at mixing jazz and poetry also influenced Joans. By the late 1950s, Joans had become one of the most recognizable faces in the Village, reading every night in hotspots Café Bizarre, Café Rafio, or the Gas Light (see color plate 3). His first poetry collection, Beat Poems, was published in 1957. Surrealism remained a major influence, most notably on the visual art Joans never stopped making. He mixed collages with poetry in works such as Beat Funky Jazz Poems (1959). René Bertelé commented about surrealist poet Jacques Prévert that his “collages were poems . . . and some of his poems were word collages”; early on, Joans’s work attested to a similar sensibility.9 But more than his poetry, what brought Joans notoriety was his participation in Fred McDarrah’s “Rent-a-beatnik,” a prank turned lucrative that offered the services of a roster of poets and hipster types for parties and soirées between 1959 and 1961. Then, at the height of his fame, Joans abandoned his domain. In 1960, he experienced a traumatizing episode: one night, near the Village, he and a white girlfriend Surrealist Solidarity

44

were verbally assaulted by a “miniature mob of united stated thuggery,” who also threw a metal garbage can at them, missing by mere feet. Joans decided to leave the country altogether rather than risk having to “‘wipe out’ an entire stoop full of meat-eating men” in anger, were this to happen again, as he expected it would.10 One might see this scene reflected in another, presented a few years later by that other Jones, LeRoi—one instance in a pattern of doublings between the two men—in his award-winning play Dutchman (1964). Near the end, Clay, the young African American man antagonized throughout the play by the crazed white woman, Lula, finally responds to her provocations with a revelation about the music of Joans’s erstwhile roommate, bebop legend Charlie Parker: “All the hip white boys scream for Bird. And Bird saying, ‘Up your ass, feeble-minded ofay! Up your ass.’. . . Bird would’ve played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw.”11 As Werner Sollors noted, the scene clearly evokes the “simplest surrealist act”—“dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly . . . into the crowd”—once described by André Breton.12 Breton also emphasized as intrinsically surrealist the necessity of recognizing the despair at the root of such an act and of “sharing this despair.”13 It falls to Clay—in whom Sollors sees a “Black Breton”—to recognize the despair in Parker that, repressed, fed his art.14 Revolt, breathing in Joans’s poetry, made him choose art and exile, following the Beat path to Paris only to find surrealism around the corner. Joans chanced upon André Breton (as he routinely did with his acquaintances)15 on a Paris street in June 1960, and the two recognized each other. Joans had sent Breton photos of himself; still, the moment felt to Joans like the confirmation of a spiritual acquaintance settled long before this encounter. Joans had seen Breton before, notably in the magazines that had introduced him to surrealism in his youth. Reminiscing about first meeting Breton in print, Joans describes an epiphany in translation: “I didn’t speak a word of German or French / so I had to buy an old second-hand dictionary to translate word by word / that is how I understood what the surrealists were saying / it was very close to what I was interested in / for example jazz / something revolutionary.”16 Something about Joans’s having to make sense of the material, to interpret it, struck him as both surrealist and akin to jazz practice. In the first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” Breton described “the pure surrealist joy of the man who . . . sets off from whatever point he chooses, by along any other path save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can”; we should be so bold as to imagine that the painstaking, Sisyphean task of word-by-word translation was Joans’s path to his first taste of surrealist joy.17 This intimate work of translation strikingly evokes another passage from Breton’s text: “I do not believe in the prophetic power of the surrealist word. . . . I pretend, unfortunately, to act in a world where, in order to take into account its suggestions, I would be obliged to resort to two kinds of interpreters, one to translate its judgments for me, the other, 45

Ted Joans, the Other Jones

impossible to find, to transmit to my fellow men whatever sense I could make out of them.”18 Impossibility notwithstanding, Joans was two interpreters, translating the voice of surrealism for himself and transmitting his interpretation of it as stemming from the same spirit as jazz, a notion he would not have found in the writings of early surrealists, who for the most part ignored music. Still, this connection was clear to Joans; later, he would imagine surrealist poet Benjamin Péret as “a tuba player, a bopper . . . spewing out distinct automatic statements.”19 But it was in Paris, in the younger generation of surrealists, that he found kindred souls equally convinced of the compatibility between surrealism and jazz. In 1953, Gérard Legrand—a member of the Paris Surrealist Group “striving to live by [his] friend Benjamin Péret’s words: ‘poet, that is to say, revolutionary’”20—argued that jazz, “with its voracious vitality, is subduing the world to surrealist musical principles,” notably in that it “elevates [collective] participation to the level of poetic dignity.”21 He further speculated that the eventual encounter between jazz and surrealism would occur in collective practices centered on automatism: “there is indeed a kinship between improvisation (collective or not) and some manifestations of surrealist automatism.”22 Two decades later, Franklin Rosemont, convinced by Joans, saw in jazz “an ally and a fraternal tendency but [also] an irreplaceable constituent element of the surrealist revolution.”23 Such kinship was notably expressed in cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), the surrealist game of blind accretion that Joans praised for “the incongruity of [its] creative collectiveness” and whose echoes Legrand recognized in jazz improvisation.24 Joans was a lifelong practitioner, as evidenced in “Long Distance,” “the world’s longest cadavre exquis,” which he started in London in 1975 and to which such distinguished contributors as Romare Bearden, Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, Michel Leiris, and Laura Corsiglia added for decades.25 If Joans favored pictorial variations of cadavre exquis, the spirit of the form also breathed in his initial attempt at translating surrealism. Joans judged that process, and the result, to have been “more surreal than the original text . . . perhaps more ‘cadavre exquis’ than literal word for word translations.”26 As a poet, he saw himself as “one who demystifies language and the universe” by way of a Black, jazz-inspired contribution to a never-ending game of cadavre exquis in collaboration with the people in his life.27 He set out for France intent on becoming “a surrealist missionary with [his] natural Black Magic from America and Africa,” meaning to translate for European audiences his understanding of jazz as revolutionary practice and eager to “colonize their minds, to attempt to transform and change the young people of Europe by surrealist and jazz ways and means.”28 In 1960, he found masses ready for jazz colonization, keen on hearing and reading him preach his “true religion,” because, like Legrand, they heard in it the same revolutionary notes he did. Surrealist Solidarity

46

Surrealist Missionary with Natural Black Magic Joans’s involvement in the European jazz scene was a crucial stage in his personal synthesis of surrealism and Black Power. He played the cornet for a time in his youth, unsatisfactorily, remaining an avid listener, and the music led him to writing. Days after he first moved to New York City in 1951, Joans sat down and typed “a series of articles on the giants of jazz [he] had seen” and sent them to local newspapers and music magazines, all of which systematically rejected them. Finding out that none of these publications employed Black writers gave him his first insight into “the institutionalized racist politics of jazz magazines.” Pitching these articles to “the Village’s small bohemian reviews,” he met Beat writers and eventually LeRoi Jones, whose experimentations in jazz poetry also inspired him.29 Jones would eventually publish in the same magazines that had turned Joans down, but only after Joans had left for Europe.30 Europe was but a way station: Africa was always Joans’s true destination. When he managed to go in 1961, he experienced a surrealist revelation that cemented his decision to live his life as a “long automatic poem.” The African continent—more specifically, Timbuktu, Mali, where he bought a house in 1962—became his home for most of the year, as Joans regularly forayed “to Europe to do my safari-for-bread (the only reason I come to this antique dull cemetery) and for chance encounters of my tribe, the Afro-American, and to obtain some Western-manufactured supplies.”31 In Europe, he was a fixture among the expatriate communities immortalized in Cecil Brown’s merciless portrayal of sex, desire, loneliness, and the African American exile, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, in which Joans appears as poet Ned Green.32 Rumors circulated that he might be in the government’s employ, hired to report on other expatriates. Such a possibility was hardly far-fetched: the CIA infiltrated radical and progressive circles in and outside the United States as a matter of course. As revealed recently, the Parisian African American expatriate community featured at least one such infiltrator in the person of journalist and Fair Play for Cuba founder Richard Gibson.33 Joans himself wrote the poem “He Spy” about a “cop concealed in our group / calling us brothers.”34 No such evidence exists regarding Joans, but it appears that the seeming ease with which Joans traveled between and within Europe and Africa—he crisscrossed the continent, often on foot, “from tangiers to algiers / from ouagadougou to timbuctoo”35—did not endear him to his compatriots. By the mid-1960s, “Ted Joans had been totally ostracized by Paris’ Black expatriate community.”36 It is just as likely that Joans’s remarkable gregariousness and networking skills played a crucial part in the jealousy and ostracization he faced. Indeed, linguistic barriers notwithstanding, Joans made friends everywhere he went, and he went everywhere. He read, performed, and exhibited his art in Mali, Tunisia, France, Great Britain, Holland, Belgium, Norway, and Denmark and in each location 47

Ted Joans, the Other Jones

got acquainted with local bohemian communities in general and surrealists in particular. Joans frequented circles of the literary and musical avant-garde (notably championing the pioneers of free jazz), but in the Village those circles tended to be rebellious but only abstractly political; in Europe, avant-garde art was closely tied to radical political groups. In ways that resonated with the African American and surrealist traditions, Joans’s European acquaintances took for granted that the revolution they wished for in society could simultaneously spring from, and spread to, all its quarters, foremost among them the arts. Case in point: the Netherlands. In 1962, Amsterdam became one of Joans’s main ports of call on his European trips. There, Joans quickly found his footing in a bohemian scene as deeply dedicated to poetry and jazz as the one he had left in Greenwich Village. A 1964 short film by Louis van Gasteren titled Jazz and Poetry features Joans reciting his classic poems “The Poet” and “Jazz Is My Religion” in an Amsterdam club, backed by a jazz foursome led by pianist Piet Kuiters, cofounder, in 1965, of the Free Jazz Inc. collective in which saxophonist Willem Breuker played. Breuker in turn started the Instant Composers Pool (a music collective and record label) and played an important role in ushering in so-called free improvised music, or what happened when free jazz took hold in Europe. With the rise of Black Power, the genre’s European practitioners would increasingly reflect on and question their relationship to African American music and culture at large—a process in which Joans featured at every turn. Amsterdam in the 1960s was a hub of political agitation, culminating between 1965 and 1967 with the heyday of the Dutch Provo movement, a cultural and political manifestation issuing from anarchist and radical leftist politics and a “happening culture” that was an heir to surrealism and a relative of the Beat generation, Fluxus, and situationism, “in which the expression of social dissent fused with various kinds of theatrical performance.”37 Joans’s clout in these circles would be difficult to downplay: the journalist Simon Vinkenoog, “most famous beat poet of the Netherlands,” Provo’s publicist, and “contact man with counter cultural movements overseas,” claimed that everything he knew about performing poetry he learned from Joans.38 Joans was the one to suggest that Vinkenoog start organizing jazz and poetry evenings in Amsterdam clubs in 1963. The two regularly shared the stage at poetry readings after that, and Joans was featured in the special manifesto issue of the Dutch magazine Randstad, edited by Vinkenoog.39 Provo’s “provocations”—playful happenings targeting corporate and political institutions—were met with increasing sympathy by Dutch youths, as police repression (against said provocations, but also against unrelated social and political protests) grew more brutal and absurd. Turmoil peaked on June 14, 1966, after the police killed a worker during a union demonstration. Provos joined in the subsequent protest that devolved into a full-on riot in the center of Amsterdam. At the Loosdrecht Jazz Festival that August, Surrealist Solidarity

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a young Willem Breuker gained national notice in presenting “Litanie voor de 14e juni 1966 . . . an 18-piece orchestra casting up a wall of musical chaos against which singer Sofie Van Lier recited newspaper reports.”40 Van Lier and Joans were lovers at the time, and it is likely that he attended the performance.41 The alliance of workers, students, and Provos on June 14, 1966, announced the many uprisings of 1968; Breuker’s concert in turn heralded the merging of the spirit of free jazz, contemporary music, and avant-garde politics that would come to be known as free improvised music. Indeed, as Robert Adlington notes, Breuker’s Litanie “invited comparison with the connection that had emerged between free jazz and political activism in the United States—a connection of which Dutch jazz musicians were well aware.”42 Free improvised music was Europe’s echo and response to free jazz, a nod to, and departure from, music European practitioners admired but in whose system of exploitation they realized they were also participating. Political awareness of the history and current state of race relations in the United States and of African American radical politics fed into a deliberate turn away from African American free jazz and toward European musical tradition for inspiration. This double movement came to characterize free improvised music. Beyond direct contact with outspoken militant musicians such as Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp, Europeans were also influenced by LeRoi Jones’s Blues People (1963)— which presented free jazz as the latest, most radical African American musical response to racial exploitation within the industry and throughout US society at large. Further yet, in the words of Fred Moten, Jones’s mid-1960s live musical poetry was “a massive intervention in and contribution to the prophetic description . . . of communism that is . . . the essence of Black radicalism.”43 A similar argument as to the political essence of live jazz poetry can be made about Joans’s own, to which European audiences were more privy: an exception among African American expatriates, Joans actively sought out passing African American jazz musicians but also performed on three continents.44 Joans played an essential role in passing and translating the meaning of Black Power to Europe, notably to surrealists.45 Nowhere was he a more instrumental cultural broker than in France, where the press contributed enormously to popularizing free jazz. A series of articles in rival magazines Jazz Hot and Jazz Magazine notably pushed a wave of new critics to the forefront along with the “New Thing.” The new critics privileged the writings of LeRoi Jones in their quest for a new analytical frame for the new music. Blues People provided such a frame, compatible with the reigning Marxist political and economic analyses. Yet, as Eric Drott argues, French journalists such as Jean-Louis Comolli—whose April 1966 article for Jazz Magazine, “Voyage au bout de la New Thing,” became “a touchstone for the French criticism of free jazz”—saw “the dynamic that played out in jazz . . . as a symptom of the broader transnational process of decolonization.”46 This outlook jarred somewhat 49

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with the more United States–centric aspects of Jones’s argument, but it was certainly compatible with the internationalist, Fanon-inspired ideas of a Stokely Carmichael or the Black Panther Party that would form later that year. Arguably, these views were also close to those of tri-continental poet Ted Joans.47 In his exile, Joans kept abreast of US culture and politics, meeting with African American artists and public figures throughout Europe. In Paris, notably, he met and spoke briefly with Malcolm X after an event at La Mutualité in 1964. That night (when he also met Aimé Césaire for the first time), Joans asked Malcolm—who recognized him as “the brother who went off to Timbuktu”—to autograph a postcard, a photo of Joans himself hiking through the desert. Malcolm X was the first signatory on what became Joans’s “Black Power postcard.”48 Aimé Césaire, Stokely Carmichael, LeRoi Jones, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler, among others, would eventually join him there.49 The moment probably inspired Joans’s poem “My Ace of Spades,” whose final lines, “Malcolm X told both of us / the truth, didn’t he?” appear to pick up where his other poem, “The Truth,” had left off: “You have nothing to / fear / from the / poet / but the / truth.”50 Malcolm X acknowledged Joans as a brother, and Joans recognized in him that ultimate ideal: the poet and truth teller. The Black Power postcard—one of Joans’s “sacred treasures”—in turn arguably served as a two-way passport; Joans used it to welcome encounters and visitors into his Black Power pantheon, and it demonstrated Joans’s political consciousness and clout. Joans’s knowledge of Africa, uncommon in the early ’60s, now struck an urgent and compelling note in times of Black nationalism and Third Worldist analysis. “They ask: what is Africa like? I tell them: Africa is like me!”: Joans’s status as hip exile set him up as a useful and knowledgeable interpreter and guide for those compatriots tempted to cross over.51 In turn, as an African American jazz aficionado versed in the language of the European avant-garde, he was his own kind of sacred treasure for the French. In the late 1960s, leading French jazz magazines solicited articles from Joans, who by then could be seen reading at Black Power readings at Shakespeare and Co. or sitting next to Césaire or Sartre at Black Power fundraisers and rallies.52 In the process, he not only translated for the French the line he saw running between free jazz and Black radical politics but also showed where the French might fit. As the piece he published in January 1968 in Jazz Magazine showed, Joans often acted as a guide to African Americans visiting Paris, as he had for Stokely Carmichael the previous month. Carmichael had been held at the border for seventeen hours by French authorities before finally being allowed into the country. Joans took him to a concert by Archie Shepp’s quintet, prompting Carmichael to exclaim, “The only revolutionaries I ever saw in Paris I met in a jazz cellar, Le Chat Qui Pêche!” Joans’s headquarters and an obligatory stop for American jazzmen since the late 1940s, Le Chat Qui Pêche had become a hub for free Surrealist Solidarity

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jazz musicians as well. Joans describes the encounter of Carmichael and Shepp (“these blacks, these young black sorcerers tell whitey jazz truth—they are not leaders—they are music spokesmen—poets”)53 as a revolutionary summit: “Four black musicians and a white one. The white musician [Roswell Rudd] is a modern John Brown. He is ready to go the whole way with Blacks, die with them if necessary. He is a white revolutionary.”54 A model, Joans implied. Joans also references Brown in Proposition pour un Manifeste Black Power / Pouvoir Noir, a manifesto in prose followed by poems first published in France: “John Browns (if there are any!) can contribute to the struggle, but in their own organizations.”55 In his “Yeahh I Dig,” published a year later in the States, the speaker encourages his addressee to “take up a gun like your own John Brown”; and in “The Non-John Browns,” the negated form of the phrase designates “the Third World’s enemy.”56 By then, popular uprisings had peppered much of the globe, students opposing the police in brutal clashes in Japan, Mexico, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and, of course, France: in May 1968, Joans was in Paris to witness the student uprising and subsequent workers’ strike come close to bringing de Gaulle’s government to its knees. On this occasion, Joans wrote a “Letter to Students and Workers in Paris”: “As a representative of B[lack] P[ower] I would like to express the solidarity with the militant students, and militant workers that are in action here in France. Your enemy is our enemy, and we hope that you will destroy that same enemy here—as we will destroy it in the USA. Vive le pouvoir noir vive le pouvoir étudiant vive le pouvoir ouvrier. Revolution must be made by all and not by one.”57 To the extent that his words aligned with the calls for armed revolution and interracial alliances of Black Power figures such as Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale (who declared in a June 1968 interview, “if any white person wants to act in the manner of a John Brown and in accordance with the needs of black people, then we can work with him”), Joans could indeed consider himself a representative, if not a spokesperson, of Black Power.58 Further yet, in his life as a Black poet in exile in the heart of whiteness, he had some experience in the rhetorical flourishes necessary to mobilize white allies for Black causes. Joans, a poet dedicated to exploring sensuality in life as in art, was fully aware of the exotic and erotic dimensions of his popularity among Europeans. His collage titled “The Real Black Power” offers a graphic interpretation of the aura of Black art: twin, erect black and red penises ejaculate semen drops that mingle with cut-out faces of the most sainted musicians in the African American jazz pantheon—Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and others (see color plate 4). The collage illustrates the same notion Joans expresses about his erotic poems when he writes that “like jazz music and jazz dance [they] come erotically into the Black Power bag.”59 Yet, as Frantz 51

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Fanon argues in Black Skin, White Masks, “in relation to the Negro, everything takes place on the genital level.” In this fetishization, the positive, celebratory relation to sex that Joans evokes disappears; “the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis.” Joans’s tongue-in-cheek and rather cynical collage suggests that one can eat the cake of racial and sexual fetishization and have the celebration too. “Real” Black Power, the collage proposes, resides not in this pervasive phallocentric white fantasy of threatening, Black sexual potency, but rather in its celebratory subversion: the transcendence of the Negro as “biological danger” into dangerous art that in turn implies dangerous politics.60 It may be that the European fascination with jazz and Black politics cannot be fully separated from fetishization, but it can pragmatically be transcended. Presenting musicians as revolutionaries with axes instead of guns and music instead of murder, exuding art as well as sex, could make the prospect of revolution appealing to anyone courageous—or, possibly, aroused—enough to listen to free jazz. If white musicians were John Browns, their listeners could, with some nudging, claim the status of fellow travelers, often to great financial effect. Discussing the “financial aid” he had obtained from acquaintances in Europe and the United States to fund his fall 1968 trip to the States (the first in seven years), Joans wrote, “I am grateful to all of them. But I owe them nothing personally or otherwise. They had their own reasons for giving me financial aid.”61 We can imagine that Joans knew well what he had bestowed upon them in the first place. He left a clue in the letter’s parting words: a rephrasing of Isidore Ducasse’s famous line from Poésies—“Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.”62 Joans felt that he and other “tropical” surrealists had a special relation to “Our Maldoror Father Lautréamont,” born in Montevideo.63 The surrealists had long adopted Ducasse’s maxim as their own, claiming their own poetic practice as radically egalitarian—and therefore political. Here, speaking to the young revolutionaries of the May ’68 uprising, Joans hinted that their action was poetry as politics, and as such constituted a perfect bridge between surrealism and Black Power.

Black Power: A Manifesto Ted Joans was not always kind to Black Power poetry, his own or others’. Looking back on his return to the United States, he mentioned his disappointment in “a lot of Brothers who were beginning poets” who in his opinion were churning out “poems dedicated to white villains, to white racism. . . . A lot of these poets have become manifesto writers.” Lest we point out the irony that the author of A Black Manifesto in Poetry and Prose was lamenting manifestoes, Joans added, “I do have a lot of poems that are blatant rhetoric—poems I wrote in 1967, soon after I met Stokely. . . . They were hand-grenade poems: poems you pulled the pin out of, threw and boom that was it.”64 And indeed, Joans’s late 1960s Surrealist Solidarity

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texts were very much “poems that kill . . . dagger poems . . . assassin poems, poems that shoot / Guns,” like those LeRoi Jones called for in “Black Art” over the somber musings of Sonny Murray’s quartet.65 Joans exposes fairly transparently the purpose of such rhetoric, aligned with the pointedly profane vocabulary adopted by many figures in Black Power circles. “lets get so violent that we leave that white way of thinking / in the toilet beneath our black behinds.”66 Black Power rhetoric in poetry and speeches applied to whites what avant-gardes since the late nineteenth century had more routinely applied to the bourgeois. Both Joans and Jones agreed that poems could be “useful” in the service of Black revolution, but their respective oeuvres show them striving in different ways to avoid limiting the new Black poem. Joans could throw grenades in closed buildings, but he maintained through the years a vision of the poet as missionary and of his poetic practice as a conduit for the surrealist notion of the marvelous. Jones—who changed his name to Amiri Baraka in 1968—shared with Joans a deeply spiritual approach to his craft, but also affected a straightforwardly activist approach that would eventually lead him into electoral politics for a time.67 Jones had demanded that there be “no love poems written / Until love can exist freely and / Cleanly”; Joans, in turn, defined his poem as a “bouquet of praises / that seduces and enchants / a woman until she blossoms forth / The poet’s poem prowls / through the nasty neon streets / demystifying death / and replacing fear with courage / that is what a poem is / when the men arent [sic] free.”68 In “A Few Blue Words to the Wise,” Joans expanded on his program: “We must write poems black brothers about our own black relations / We must fall in love and glorify our beautiful black nation / We must create black images give the world / a black education.”69 Scrutinized, listened to, and commented on as they were, Joans and Jones were arguably the two principal sources of Black Power politics and poetics in 1960s France, and the discrepancies in their approaches were in turn echoed in French letters. That Joans still saw himself as an agent for the “black education” of the world suggests that he saw even his hand-grenade poems as surrealist in intent and language. Surrealists, arguably, saw it too: in 1968, the Dutch Surrealistich Kabinet published Joans’s first European book, The Truth, a Poem, featuring his eponymous signature poem in thirty-six different languages. The same year, Joans’s Manifeste was translated in part by the surrealist Robert Benayoun and published by Eric Losfeld, the editor of several surrealist reviews and a regular publisher of their books. In turn, surrealists in the Netherlands and Great Britain published translations titled Mijn Zwarte Gedachten: Een manifest and A Black Manifesto in Jazz Poetry and Prose the following year. Pragmatically, this also suggests that Joans had few illusions about whom these poems might shock or how: although he warns about his Black Manifesto, “dig me whiteboy, This Ain’t Your Bit!!,” Joans admits awareness in the same sentence that “a whole lotta white motherfuckers 53

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shall buy and read this manifesto.”70 Just as well: his poetry—like jazz—might just be the push needed to make John Browns of them yet. How to reconcile Joans’s surrealist leanings with his political poetry? “French-born revolutionary” Benjamin Péret, whose presence Joans declared feeling when he sat down to write, notoriously kept his political engagement and his poetry separate, following David Gascoyne’s precept that “poetry must not be confused with propaganda.”71 Further still, nothing in surrealist manifestoes addressed the particular struggles of personal liberation from a Black point of view, yet for Joans, “invoking surrealist modernism was a means of interrogating supra-personal structures of racial inequality as they had manifested themselves politically, culturally and socially in the trans-Atlantic world.”72 Before he left the United States, Joans feared that he had reached a point where his Village audience did not take him seriously, though “he was just saying” things that mattered deeply to him, performing for them.73 In that situation, Joans turned to Black literary traditions and poets that he saw as fundamentally surrealist, whether or not European surrealists themselves recognized them as such. Thus Joans named as inspiration for his “‘hand grenade’ poems” his other “February spiritual father,” Langston Hughes.74 Hughes’s influence had as much to do with attitude as with form and content: “Langston knew how to associate with the . . . seekers after Negro life, without losing himself. He knew how to wade in the water, get wet, but not drown. . . . He would show up, read, and not once bite his lip.”75 Seeking in Europe a bigger pond in which to wade without drowning, without jeopardizing his personal integrity, 76 Joans had carved out a role as an itinerant Black educator to Europe. This role was on display in Manifeste, which opens with epigraphs by Stokely Carmichael and LeRoi Jones. Immediately following the manifesto proper—and absent from the 1969 English edition—are ten pages of quotations from Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, W. C. Handy, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, Abbey Lincoln, Robert F. Williams, and Sun Ra, to cite but a few, a who’s who of Black international thought with clear pedagogical intent. The book also announced Joans’s return to the United States in the fall of 1968. Sponsored by “the French surrealists, Dutch avant-garde people and two white Americans,” Joans claimed he had originally returned “to see my family / read my poems / obtain supplies / and to be published.” The Joans who arrived in New York City that year “no longer sound[ed] like the beatnik poets of the Fifties that he grew up with. . . . What he has to say is firmer than ever.”77 White America, though, had not changed much: tasked with reporting on the Third Black Power Conference in Philadelphia as the conference’s communication workshop co-chair, Joans saw his piece refused by the Village Voice. This left him “more convinced than ever that there is a need for a Black news media.” In the United States for a few months, he attended conferences and gave readings, receiving “a warm family welcome in the black communities of Harlem, Newark, and Philadelphia.” Surrealist Solidarity

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His original plans changed as he identified “the need for first hand information about Africa, plus the demystification of Europe’s greatness.”78 There was a role for him to play in the revolutionary struggle in the United States that did not necessitate his presence there. If the Village Voice did not want his prose, Joans found underground publications more than happy to print it. He notably made contact at that time with Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, jazz aficionados and founders of the first American surrealist group, in Chicago, and his writings and collages were regularly featured in their publication Arsenal from its first issue in 1970. Ever the interpreter. Joans’s dedication to global Black politics met jazz in style at the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, where African American artists and political figures gathered for the second edition of the continental festival. Joans participated in debates and discussions and, along with the poet Don Lee (Haki Madhubuti), twice spoke poetry to music performed by Archie Shepp’s free jazz quintet. “Jazz is an African music,” Joans proclaimed during a performance immortalized on record and film in which Tuareg musicians accompanied the free jazz outfit: “We have come back.”79 In the words of Nathan Hare, the festival was “a battle” over “the role of culture in the struggle for liberation and in social and economic development.”80 On the margins of the festival per se, the split between Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panther Party played out to much publicity: Carmichael felt that the organization was too close to and reliant on white allies, while the Panther Party, speaking through minister of information Eldridge Cleaver, branded Carmichael a “cultural nationalist” more interested in Blackness than in revolution. The festival marked a turning point for many African American artists and militants, after which many began understanding the African African struggle in a broader, transnational frame. The event also provided a concrete connection to the ancestral continent at a time when African roots were becoming a source of pride and soul searching. Joans had been something of a pioneer in these matters, but the festival may have influenced his subsequent deep poetic reflection on the cultural and political implications of his position as cultural go-between. In “Cinque Maggio,” a poem dedicated to “Ras Tafari / the young lion with bold teeth,” Joans evokes Black history, European colonialism, and the responsibility of the poet by way of that most maudit of surrealist heroes, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud.81 The poem’s speaker interpellates the ghost of Rimbaud, who (in)famously, in his post-poetry years, wandered to Ethiopia in the 1880s, less than a decade before Italy would first try—and fail—to take over the independent African country. Rimbaud’s record there is ambivalent: he set out to sell guns to King Menelik of Abyssinia, and though this scheme eventually failed lamentably, he met in the process the king’s cousin, Makonnen, governor of Harar, and his son Tafari, the future emperor Haile Selassie. A dark cloud hovers over Rimbaud’s life in Africa, where he may have been involved in human trafficking.82 This is what Joans is referring to when he asks: 55

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Rimbaud, were you a white man, instead of a poet at Harar? where dark women nursed sick strangers who were a long way from home?  Rimbaud, were you a gun runner instead of an enslaver? in Abyssinia where the sun made your season in Hell a bright illumination.83

Beneath the incredulous questioning that Joans’s speaker aims at Rimbaud’s ghost lurks a glimmer of hope: maybe the Frenchman, though he was no longer writing poetry, found the marvelous in the quotidian, turned his existence into the sort of “poemlife” that Joans built for himself. But Rimbaud’s legacy is also part of his life. As a teenage poet,

Rimbaud had famously declared, “I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.”84 How, then, could he not have prophesied Italy’s defeat in 1896 and its return to Africa, with Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1935, when it invaded Ethiopia in an atrocious war under the impotent eye of the League of Nations? “Rimbaud, why did you not write / the frightening nightmares to come?” the speaker asks. It seems Rimbaud cannot hear; in any case, he does not respond. The speaker is left alone to neither forgive nor forget what Italy did and to “remember the Fifth of May.”85 That is the date on which Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935 but also, by one of those twists of fate of which Joans and the surrealists are so fond, the date on which Ethiopia was eventually liberated in 1941. This second occasion does not quite transpire in the poem, but the double significance arguably provides the poem with its central dynamic: did not Rimbaud assert “I is someone else?”86 I am an other, a stranger to oneself, certainly, with equal potential to be(come) a wonder or a disappointment. “If the brass wakes up a bugle, it is not its fault,” the young poet asserted with carelessness—entitlement, seemingly rejecting personal agency in change.87 Joans’s poem asks about responsibility, and if Rimbaud cannot answer, it isn’t just because he is dead: Rimbaud’s involvement in the network of European colonialism cannot simply be absolved by invoking the promise of his previous texts. Ultimately, his poems failed not only to achieve a “total liberation of the mind”; they also failed to play their part in collective improvisation. They failed as a living thing, as a politics. Rimbaud’s former glory as a poet cannot quite cover the failure of his life as poem. Maybe it is not the brass’s fault: but, by contrast, Joans, when confronted with his own limits as a cornet player (a cornet so damaged he had to “play it like a bugle”),88 made the difficult choice to toss it in the Mississippi River. The poem addresses Rimbaud, but its line of questioning is directly relevant to Joans’s own plight as a metaphorical gunrunner of Black Power in the darkest corners of Europe. Rimbaud wrote his family to assure them he had not become a slave trader; his tribulations had brought him to a place where such an utter betrayal of the promises of radical freedom found in his poetry had become a distinct possibility. Joans designed his poemlife so that he would never find himself in a similarly ambiguous position. To Surrealist Solidarity

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achieve his mission of proselytizing Blackness in a surrealist way, Joans turned himself into a universal interpreter, shower of the flaws, revelator of the rare kindnesses of Europe and the white West, “John Brown whisperer” and advisor to the Black world. Speaking of meeting Joans in Paris in 1974, Mali-born writer and scholar Manthia Diawara revealed the advice the poet gave him: “Go to America because they will accept you all there. . . . You will make it in America, but you won’t make it here. And I want you to make it, so this is what I’m going to advise you to do even though I don’t like America myself.”89 Clear-eyed about the particulars of French racism, Joans expressed the pragmatism of a poet aware of his position on the cusp of entertainment and revolution, and of the minute translations and readjustments necessary to maintain balance and perpetuate one’s life as work of art, jazz poem, and surrealist song. In a 1995 letter to Amiri Baraka, Joans noted with humor and a soupçon of melancholy, “So, brother Baraka, I remain / as usual, outside the outsiders. / Afterall [sic], I am a lover, thus I / I must not disrupt institutions of / conventionalism by my presence!”90 Joans’s perpetual elusiveness and absence from the canon may be in the end the truest and most poignant homage to his oeuvre. Joans was a Beat and a surrealist but also always something else. In its “privileging of process over product,” his work constituted a bridge between avant-garde radicalism and a jazz aesthetic whose dedication to the now shimmers throughout his entire career.91 “Instigator of magical encounters,” Joans was also the interpreter of a complex jazz melody all its own—one that speaks to all but that no one can quite repeat or wholly tether. Notes Sincere thanks to Laura Corsiglia for her kindness and for granting permission to reproduce Ted Joans’s art for this essay. 1. Randolph, “Still Cool.” See also Ronan, “Ted Joans Lives!” 2. Joans, “Sand,” in Afrodisia, 56. 3. Joans, quoted in Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 313; Joans, “Journal Jotting 29.9.87,” quoted in Pawlik, “Ted Joans’ Surrealist History Lesson,” 222. 4. Joans, “Never,” in Black Pow-Wow, 86; Joans, “I, Black Surrealist” (also quoted in Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 318). In this chapter, I use LeRoi Jones or Amiri Baraka according to the name the poet used in the time period discussed. 5. Joans, “Griot surréaliste,” 22. 6. Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 308. 7. Joans, “Je me vois,” 224. 8. Baraka, Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, 185. 9. Aurouet, Prévert, 64. 10. Joans, “Je me vois,” 234. 11. Jones [Baraka], Dutchman, 21. 12. Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, 127; Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 125.

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13. Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 126. 14. Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, 127. 15. P. Rosemont, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields, 100. 16. Joans, “Griot surréaliste,” 23. 17. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 46. 18. Ibid., 45. 19. Joans, “Je me vois,” 251. 20. Péret quoted in Legrand, Puissances du jazz, 10. My translation. 21. Ibid., 193–94, 218. 22. Ibid., 202. 23. F. Rosemont, “Black Music and the Surrealist Revolution,” 18. 24. Joans, “Je me vois,” 248. 25. See Schaffner, “In Advance of the Return,” 23n10. See also P. Rosemont, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields, 107–9. 26. Joans, “Black Tonguelash,” in Poet Painter / Former Villager, 22. 27. Desmangles, “Remembering Ted Joans.”

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28. Joans, quoted in Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 311; Joans, “Black Tonguelash,” in Poet Painter / Former Villager, 28. 29. Joans, “Griot surréaliste,” 23. 30. Baraka, Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, 253. 31. Joans, quoted in Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 312, 318. 32. Brown, Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, 49–53. 33. See Saunders, Cultural Cold War, passim. See also Morley, “CIA Reveals Name.” 34. Joans, “He Spy,” in Black Pow-Wow, 51. 35. Joans, “No Mad Talk,” ibid., 20. 36. Williams, “Ted’s Dead,” 244. 37. Adlington, Composing Dissent, 65. 38. Ibid., 140; Vinkenoog, “Ted Joans,” 378. 39. See Buelens, “With Golden Guilder Ears.” See also Ledure, “Theodore Joans.” 40. Rusch, “Pitched Battles,” 45. See also Buzelin and Buzelin, Willem Breuker. 41. On Joans and Van Lier, see Otomo, “Let’s Get TEDucated!” 42. Adlington, Composing Dissent, 99. 43. Moten, In the Break, 86. 44. Lewis, Power Stronger Than Itself, 221. 45. P. Rosemont, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields, 111. 46. Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution, 122, 120; Comolli, “Voyage au bout de la New Thing.” 47. Discussing this idea would take me beyond the purview of this chapter, but I believe that Ted Joans had a significant influence on Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli’s classic French treatise in jazz studies, Free Jazz / Black Power. 48. See Desmangles, “Remembering Ted Joans.” 49. Joans, “Je me vois,” 249–50. 50. Joans, “My Ace of Spades,” in Black Pow-Wow, 96; Joans, Truth, a Poem, 1. 51. Joans, “Like Me,” in Black Pow-Wow, 73. 52. Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 319. 53. Joans, “Jazz Expo ’67,” in Black Manifesto, 49. 54. Joans, “Black Power et New Thing.” 55. Joans, “Proposition,” in Black Manifesto, 15; Joans, Proposition pour un Manifeste, 13. 56. Joans, “Yeahh I Dig,” in Black Pow-Wow, 45; “Non-John Browns,” ibid., 61. 57. Joans, “Letter to Students and Workers in Paris,” in Poet Painter / Former Villager, 41.

58. Allen, “Panthers Sound Off,” 7. 59. Joans, Afrodisia, 69. 60. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 121, 130, 127. 61. Joans, “Black Writer Comes Home,” unpaginated. 62. Ducasse, Poésies, 10. 63. Joans, “Je me vois,” 248. 64. Gates, “Ted Joans: Tri-Continental Poet,” 73, 79, 81. 65. Murray, “Black Art.” 66. Joans, “lets get violent!,” in Black Pow-Wow, 12. 67. See Baraka, Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, 407–11. 68. Baraka, “Black Art,” 149; Joans, “Poem Why,” in Black Manifesto, 92. 69. Joans, “A Few Blue Words to the Wise,” in Black Pow-Wow, 34. 70. Joans, “Proposition,” in Black Manifesto, 15. 71. Joans, “Je me vois,” 251; Gascoyne, “First English Surrealist Manifesto,” 78. 72. Pawlik, “Ted Joans’ Surrealist History Lesson,” 223. 73. Joans, “Black Flower.” 74. Joans, “Je me vois,” 251. 75. Gates, “Ted Joans: Tri-Continental Poet,” 82. 76. Joans, “Je me vois,” 251. 77. Young, “War, Poetry, and Song.” 78. Joans, “Black Writer Comes Home,” unpaginated. 79. Shepp, “We Have Come Back.” See also Klein, Festival panafricain d’Alger. 80. Hare, “Algiers 1969,” 3. 81. Joans, “Cinque Maggio,” in Afrodisia, 16. 82. See Miller, Blank Darkness, 162. 83. Joans, “Cinque Maggio,” in Afrodisia, 16. 84. Rimbaud, “To Paul Demeny,” 377. 85. Joans, “Cinque Maggio,” in Afrodisia, 17. 86. Rimbaud, “To Paul Demeny,” 375. 87. Ibid. I have modified the translation from “trumpet” to “bugle,” as Rimbaud’s original word, clairon, clearly identifies the latter. 88. Joans, “Griot surréaliste,” 22. 89. McCluskey, “Troubling the Waters,” 2. 90. Joans, “Excerpt,” in Poet Painter / Former Villager, 51–52. 91. Kohli, “Sounding Across the City,” 104.

Bibliography Adlington, Robert. Composing Dissent: Avant-Garde Music in 1960s Amsterdam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Allen, Robert. “Panthers Sound Off: Freedom and Power Now.” Guardian, June 1, 1968.

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Aurouet, Carole. Prévert: Portrait d’une vie. Paris: Ramsay, 2007. Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997.

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———. “Black Art.” In SOS: Poems, 1961–2013, edited by Paul Vangelisti, 149–50. New York: Grove Press, 2014. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)” and “Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930).” In Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 1–48 and 117–94, respectively. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Brown, Cecil. The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. 1969. Berkeley: Frog Books, 2008. Buelens, Geert. “With Golden Guilder Ears: Perceptions of Amsterdam as City and Symbol in the Sixties.” Amsterdam, the Magic Center: Art and Counterculture, 1967–1970, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, August 17, 2018. https://​www​.stedelijk​.nl​/en​/digdeeper​ /golden​-guilder​-ears​-perceptions​-amsterdam. Buzelin, Françoise, and Jean Buzelin. Willem Breuker. Paris: Éditions du Limon, 1992. Carles, Philippe, and Jean-Louis Comolli. Free Jazz / Black Power. Translated by Grégory Pierrot. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Comolli, Jean-Louis. “Voyage au bout de la New Thing.” Jazz Magazine, April 1966, 23–28. Desmangles, Justin. “Remembering Ted Joans: Black Beat Surrealist.” Open Space, December 5, 2017. https://​openspace​.sfmoma​.org​/2017​ /12​/remembering​-ted​-joans​-black​-beat​ -surrealist. Drott, Eric. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Ducasse, Isidore. Poésies. Vol. 2. Paris: Librairie Gabrie, 1870. Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black Writers in France, 1840–1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markman. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Gascoyne, David. “A First English Surrealist Manifesto.” 1935. In Robert Fraser, Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne, 77–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Gates, Skip [Henry Louis]. “Ted Joans: TriContinental Poet; Interview by Skip Gates.” Discourse 20, nos. 1–2 (1998): 72–90. Hare, Nathan. “Algiers 1969: A Report on the PanAfrican Cultural Festival.” Black Scholar 1, no. 1 (1969): 2–10. Joans, Ted. Afrodisia. New York: Hill and Wang, 1970.

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———. “Black Flower: Ted Joans, Poet, Talking to Dave Kennard.” Other Scenes 1, no. 2 (1968): 14. ———. A Black Manifesto in Jazz Poetry and Prose. London: Calder and Boyars, 1969. ———. “Black Power et New Thing.” Jazz Magazine, January 1968, 19. ———. Black Pow-Wow: Jazz Poems. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969. ———. “A Black Writer Comes Home to black power.” 1968. BANC MSS 99/244 z, Ted Joans Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. ———. “Le griot surréaliste.” Jazz Hot, July–August 1969, 22–25. ———. “I, Black Surrealist.” Opus international 123–24 (April–May 1991): 74–75. ———. “Je me vois (I See Myself).” In Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series, vol. 25, edited by Shelly Andrews, 219–58. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996. ———. Proposition pour un Manifeste Black Power / Pouvoir Noir. Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1968. ———. Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller. Parts 1 and 2, edited by Wendy Tronrud and Ammiel Alcalay. Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, ser. 6, no. 4. New York: CUNY Center for the Humanities, 2016. ———. The Truth, a Poem. Amsterdam: Surrealistich Kabinet, 1968. Jones, LeRoi [Amiri Baraka]. “Dutchman” and “The Slave,” Two Plays by LeRoi Jones. 1964. New York: Harper Perennial, 1971. Klein, William, dir. Festival panafricain d’Alger. 1969; Algiers: ONCIC. Film, 112 min. Kohli, Amor. “Sounding Across the City: Ted Joans’s Bird Lives! as Jazz Performance.” In Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the “Howl” Generation, edited by Deborah R. Geis, 97–107. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Ledure, Olivier. “Theodore Joans, Jazz Was His Religion.” Mediapart Blogs, October 11, 2015. https://​blogs​.mediapart​.fr​/olivier​-ledure​ /blog​/111015​/ted​-joans​-jazz​-was​-his​-religion. Legrand, Gérard. Puissances du jazz. Paris: Arcanes, 1953. Lewis, George. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. McCluskey, Audrey T. “Troubling the Waters: A Conversation with Manthia Diawara.” Black Camera 21, no. 1 (2006): 1–11. Miller, Christopher L. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

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Morley, Jefferson. “CIA Reveals Name of Former Spy in JFK Files—And He’s Still Alive.” Newsweek, May 15, 2018. http://​www​ .newsweek​.com​/richard​-gibson​-cia​-spies​ -james​-baldwin​-amiri​-baraka​-richard​-wright​ -cuba​-926428. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Murray, Sonny. “Black Art.” Sonny’s Time Now. JIHAD663. Newark: Jihad Productions, 1965. 33⅓ rpm. Otomo, Yuko. “Let’s Get TEDucated! Tribute to Ted Joans.” Arteidolia, June 2015. http://​www​ .arteidolia​.com​/tribute​-to​-ted​-joans​-yuko​ -otomo. Pawlik, Joanna. “Ted Joans’ Surrealist History Lesson.” International Journal of Francophone Studies 14, nos. 1–2 (2011): 221–39. Randolph, Eleanor. “Still Cool: The Beat Goes On.” Washington Post, Style section, May 23, 1994. Rimbaud, Arthur. “To Paul Demeny (Letter to the Visionary).” In Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, translated by Wallace Fowlie, 372–81. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Ronan, Stephen. “Ted Joans Lives! Tribute (13).” Empty Mirror, February 2, 2012. http://​www​ .emptymirrorbooks​.com​/beat​/tedjoanslives​ -13. Rosemont, Franklin, ed. “Black Music and the Surrealist Revolution.” Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 17–28.

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Rosemont, Penelope. Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. San Francisco: City Lights, 2019. Rusch, Loes. “Pitched Battles: Dutch Improvised Music, Authorities, and Strategies.” In The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This Is Our Music, edited by Nicholas Gebhardt and Tony Whyton, 42–60. New York: Routledge, 2015. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press, 2013. Schaffner, Ingrid. “In Advance of the Return of the Cadavre Exquis.” In The Return of the Cadavre Exquis, edited by Jane Philbrick, 15–23. New York: Drawing Center, 1993. Shepp, Archie. “We Have Come Back.” Live at the Pan-African Festival. Performed by Archie Shepp, Alan Silva, Clifford Thornton, Sunny Murray, Grachan Moncur III, Don Lee, Dave Burrell, and Ted Joans. BYG Records, 1971. 33⅓ rpm. Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a Populist Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Vinkenoog, Simon. “Ted Joans: Van mond tot mond.” De Gids 147, nos. 1–2 (1984): 377–79. Williams, Gerald. “Ted’s Dead: Hushing the Fuss.” Massachusetts Review 46, no. 2 (2005): 244–48. Young, Israel G. “War, Poetry, and Song.” Other Scenes 2, no. 7 (1968): 21.

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Angry, Hopeful Chaos and the Great Secret of Surrealism Unraveling the Tangled Web of the 1970s

Penelope Rosemont

3.

Alive, awake, aflame, we are united in mad love.

—Ron Sakolsky, 2005

“Danger: Do not remove this tag!” “condemned.” A multipurpose label, 3 × 8 inches, this silent agitator, issued by the Chicago Surrealist Group, was popularly posted on police stations, corporations such as Monsanto and Boeing, schools, prisons, and outstandingly ugly new buildings. The small print read, “Having been found severely injurious to the human spirit this building has been condemned by the surrealist movement. ‘The brilliant past has made brilliant promises to the future; it will keep them.’—Lautréamont.” Part of the surrealist, ongoing, never-ending campaign against complacency, bourgeois or other, this détournement brightened the day for many, like the runaway slogan of the ’60s invented by protosurrealists of Solidarity Bookshop, “Make Love, Not War,” that appeared everywhere from coast to coast.1

Exhilarated state. Deepest pit of hell. That was the 1970s. Surrealists needed to get past the negativity and discouragement of 1969, distance themselves from leftist factions, and choose to pursue distinctly surrealist activity. In print, in galleries, and in the streets, surrealists broadcast their message to the United States, clarified what surrealism was, defended its heritage, and enlarged and expanded the surrealist critique. We found our roots in American sources from Bill Holman to T-Bone Slim to Memphis Minnie and Sun Ra. The 1960s had been a period of organizing ideas and finding accomplices and friends whose thoughts and lives ran parallel. Now surrealism might ignite. The 1980s, by contrast, were to be a decade of group and individual accomplishment, as ideas were published and individual styles were established in poetry, painting, collage, and sculpture while engaging actively in surrealism and the world. The decade in between, the 1970s, is remembered as a hectic, frantic time of transition. Immersed in surrealist activities, we practiced surrealist methods of critique and

experimentation while seeking ourselves through passional attractions, experiencing others in electric encounters, and immersing ourselves in poetry, in popular culture, and in the found marvels of everyday life. All things were possible. All vistas were without limits. Or we were doomed to die in despair. We weren’t sure which. The first call of the ’70s began in January 1970 with the appearance of the special issue of Radical America titled “Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution.” The theoretical journal of the New Left, Radical America was edited and published by Paul Buhle as an SDS journal in Madison, Wisconsin. Franklin Rosemont wrote:urrealism itself arises here and now to challenge and destroy the lying insinuations leveled against it.”2 The issue brought together surrealists, both US and international: André Breton, Aimé Césaire, Antonin Artaud, Paul Garon, Leonora Carrington, Jean Schuster, Robert Benayoun, Claude Courtot, Vincent Bounoure, Toyen, Laurens Vancrevel, Ted Joans, Gérard Legrand, Conroy Maddox, Joyce Mansour, Schlechter Duvall, and many more (see color plate 5). Next, the first issue of Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, the first US journal founded and edited entirely by surrealists, inspired in the dark days of 1969 and dated 1970, received excellent support and distribution through movement bookshops and friends, beginning with a surrealist window at Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago (fig. 3.1). A friend of Allen Ginsberg’s and Studs Terkel’s and part of the women’s movement, Barbara ran the city’s most avant-garde bookstore. Others who joined us included Clarence John Laughlin, known for his hauntingly transformed photographs of New Orleans, and well-loved San Francisco poet Pete Winslow. We visited Laughlin at the Pontalba Buildings, and he and Ellen Gilchrist gave us a splendid surrealist tour of New Orleans, its shadowy tombs, rural back roads, and romantic city streets. Joseph Jablonski joined our group. Living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he proved to be an original and insightful theoretician of myth, a fine storyteller, a splendid poet, and one of the mainstays of US surrealism. Jablonski produced a surrealist extravaganza, an exhibition titled Surrealism in 2012: Toward the Rise of the Fifth Sun. Milan-based Arturo Schwarz published his Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, enriching our thinking about Duchamp’s contribution and inspiring further experimentation with found objects and surrealist methods of making art. Paris in October 1970: Franklin and I found that visiting surrealist friends was quite different from our first visit in 1965. We arrived in a militarized city; busloads of armed police lined the streets; the bridges on the Seine sprouted machine-gun posts, tense and on alert. It was the trial of activist Alain Geismar. No longer was it possible to meet at La Promenade de Venus—the café was overwhelmed with would-be followers. Stormy political weather worldwide. In 1968, I was working in the SDS national office, mainly in Surrealist Solidarity

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Fig. 3.1  Surrealist window at Barbara’s Bookstore featuring Robert Green’s assemblage, Long Before You Were Born, 1968, Chicago, 1970. Reproduced with permission from the personal archives of Penelope Rosemont.

its printshop, Liberation Press. It was there that Franklin Rosemont’s book The Morning of a Machine Gun was printed. By chance, it simultaneously appeared in May ’68. It felt like being at the center of a hurricane, though that center was not calm but frantic. In Chicago in August ’68, the “whole world was watching,” and it was amazed at what it saw. The Paris group was fragmented and at odds. Friends no longer met. It was possible at different times to visit Vincent Bounoure, Claude Courtot, Gérard Legrand, JeanClaude Silbermann, Toyen, Annie Le Brun, Alain Joubert, and others. We walked into the Présence Africane bookstore and Aimé Césaire happened to be there; Paris was truly a place of chance encounters still. The great poetry of Césaire, especially Return to My Native Land (1969), was an important key to our poetic sensibility. Franklin Rosemont was fascinated by word magic and began to write poetry every day. Stacks of wonderful poems remain unpublished even now. 63

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Surrealists were movers in this angry but hopeful chaos. Empowered by the idea of alternative futures, we were certain that what we did would make a difference. It began with the Prague Spring, in which surrealists played a key role, especially Vratislav Effenberger and Ivan Sviták. May ’68 in Paris was a period of exhilaration and risk. The walls carried surrealist slogans, including “All power to the imagination.” Surrealist friends participated in artistic events, were found in the streets, behind the barricades and issued provocative manifestoes. After the defeat of the student-led uprising, the Paris group splintered into at least three factions. Schuster, Legrand, and José Pierre declared an end to surrealism; Georges Goldfayn began a new journal; and Vincent Bounoure edited a modest Bulletin de liaison surréaliste but insisted on using the word surrealism, defending what it stood for and continuing group activity. However, Pierre, Schuster, and Legrand did an important service to surrealists and scholars alike by carefully compiling several volumes of the collected papers of surrealism with commentary.3 In London, we met the wonderfully antireligious surrealist Conroy Maddox and found C. L. R. James living far from Buckingham Palace in a working-class neighborhood, another world. The author of Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways remained an unrepentant revolutionary. Our anarchist, surrealist, situationist friend Charles Radcliffe, an electric encounter from our first trip, could only be contacted on the phone. In despair, unable to put out a third issue of his stunningly original journal Heatwave, he had been charged with crimes, pursued, gotten involved with drugs, gone into hiding, and been imprisoned. For many years, before his death in 2021, he lived in Spain, where he wrote a memoir called Don’t Start Me Talking. Walking down O’Connell Street in Dublin in our first hour there, by chance, we met Irene Plazeweska, a friend from SDS. Irene has been active in surrealism ever since. Bernard Marszalek, a surrealist-oriented Solidarity Bookshop member, moved to California, where he established a co-op printshop, Inkworks. Bernard is still applying his merciless critique, with an introduction to Paul Lafargue’s famous Right to Be Lazy and cutting-edge articles for CounterPunch. In Holland, Her de Vries and Laurens Vancrevel also refused to abandon surrealism and continued to produce their journal, Brumes Blondes. They edited and published an important international collection, What Will Be. For the November 1971 Telos conference, Franklin Rosemont, John Simmons, David Schanoes, and I traveled to Buffalo, New York; we prepared papers, a booklet, and a pamphlet and also made a presentation. There we met Max Stanford Jr., John Bracey Jr., the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Trivo Inđić from Yugoslavia, and Herbert Marcuse, whose Eros and Civilization had long been a major influence on our thinking. We spent some time in discussion with Marcuse and later exchanged letters, which were published in Arsenal in 1989. While the conference was good for us in terms of the contacts we made and the people we met, it did not make us any friends in the Telos group, Surrealist Solidarity

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then infatuated with György Lukács. Our pamphlet In Memory of Georges [sic] Lukacs (he wasn’t dead) called him a syphilitic idiot. Marcuse remarked that he thought it wasn’t correct to call Lukács a syphilitic idiot; after all, Nietzsche had syphilis. That was his only criticism. Later, I got fired from my high-paying job at Technicolor. Worse, my mother and several friends died in a car accident, and for a while it was difficult to function. There were wonderful moments, as when we came up with a zoo, or rather anti-zoo, leaflet, “The Anteater’s Umbrella.” Written in a playful mood and illustrated with drawings by Leonora Carrington, it was read at Lincoln Park Zoo and widely reprinted. Surrealists always felt a strong affinity for animal life and the natural world, influenced as they were by Charles Darwin and Lautréamont’s Maldoror. A minor plus was some renovation at the zoo. On one occasion, the group met at an all-night restaurant called Mr. Pancake, and John Simmons climbed on the table and narrated a horse race Kentucky Derby–style, but the horses were political figures: Trotsky, Stalin, Lunacharsky, etc. “It’s Trotsky by a length!” yelled Simmons. The pancake house exploded in uproar! David Schanoes, John Simmons, Paul Garon, Louise Hudson, Peter Manti, Franklin, and I made up the core of the Chicago group. Simmons, Schanoes, and Manti, widely divergent personalities, could not agree on anything. During a meeting in a Clark Street bar, Simmons accidently hit Louise with a cream pie meant for Manti (a disaster—he loved her madly, if hopelessly). Schanoes and Simmons ambushed Manti at night and attempted to beat him up. All ended up with black eyes and bruises. Schanoes and Simmons were angry when Franklin and I took a trip to Florida, and they demanded an explanation. Schanoes regressed to Old Left ideas. Simmons was haunted by nightmares of Abraham Lincoln. Manti became a member of the intolerable Labor Committee run by the crazy Lynn Marcus. It was impossible to exist as group any longer. Schanoes and Simmons published the anti-Rosemont newsletter Nightwatch. The last issue appeared in 1976. Steven Schwartz (expelled in 1975), always on the West Coast but an extremely frequent correspondent, put out Anti-Narcissus, went off the deep end, and turned against surrealism. Suffering from an “identity crisis,” he joined practically every group on the left and then moved to the right, where he worked for Republican Ed Meese. He has since converted to Islam. In the spring of 1971, Franklin and I chose to go to Mexico on a quest to find Octavio Paz and Leonora Carrington and the ruins of Mayan civilization. We did find Leonora—at once a powerful presence, whose thoughts had the musical flight of a bird—and she warmly welcomed us and let us wander through her house, experiencing one fantastic painting after another. Each painting hid a message, perhaps a different one for whomever looked at it. Leonora lectured us in her delightful way on Mexico and the world. She had traveled to Chicago during the recent demonstrations in Mexico City, in which many students had 65

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been massacred. Her friends put her and her family on the first plane out of Mexico, but she found Chicago, too, in turmoil. Paz resigned from his diplomatic post in India over the massacre, and he was probably in Paris at this time. Leonora had a copy of Arsenal we had sent, and she liked it, remarking that it had the surrealist spirit she remembered. Poet and revolutionary Benjamin Péret and she had been great friends; she joked that he and his three comrades had their own private conspiracy against the world. And then she hesitated and added, “After all, I suppose that’s what we all do. That’s how we survive.” It was not as easy to get out of Mexico City as it was to get in—confusion galore, flights canceled, hotels wouldn’t provide information, airlines wouldn’t answer phones, but with help we finally got to Mérida late at night. This was supposed to be the land of giant, night-blooming, narcotic, hypnosis-provoking orchids, though I never found even one. The air was delicious. We arrived to huge banners proclaiming, “Welcome El Presidente!” The president of Guatemala was meeting the president of Mexico—at our hotel. We got to the ruins, not yet commercialized. It was April and hot, hot, hot like I had never experienced. We marveled at the wonderful buildings of the Mayans at Chichen Itza and Uxmal. Looking out across the green landscape from the top of the Pyramid of the Magician, we felt the power of their dream manifested in this architecture of wonder.4 Surrealist Paul Garon arrived in Chicago in 1969 and was a founder of Living Blues magazine. Edited and published in Chicago, Living Blues was the first blues magazine in the United States; its first issue appeared in 1970. England already had blues expert Paul Oliver and an entire magazine devoted to US blues music, Blues Unlimited. Remarkably, it was because of Radcliffe that we met Garon, and because of the great songs of Peetie Wheatstraw that we became friends. Garon was the first of us to do a book, The Devil’s Son-in-Law: The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw and His Songs, which appeared in 1971. Garon literally saved Wheatstraw from oblivion, got out there where he roamed and did the field work while Peetie’s friends were still alive. In 1975, Garon wrote the group’s first book-length surrealist critique. This was a surrealist/poetic analysis of everyday life through popular culture titled Blues and the Poetic Spirit. As Garon points out, “The blues, as it reflects human desire, projects the imaginative possibilities of true erotic existence. Hinted at are new realities of non-repressive life, dimly grasped in our current state of alienation and repression, but nonetheless implicit in the character of sexuality as it is treated in the blues. Desire defeats the existing morality—poetry comes into being.”5 He found great lyrics from Sonny Boy Williamson, Mercy Dee, Blind Blake, Victoria Spivey, and others, illustrating his points with quotations from the songs themselves. In 1974, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of surrealism, US surrealists put out a manifesto, “The Monster of Consciousness Remains at Large.” Robert Green was in jail in Surrealist Solidarity

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Chiapas, arrested illegally with 150 others. In Paris, surrealist editor Édouard Jaguer included our group in his lavish Phases magazine. We began the Surrealist Research and Development Monograph series, which has included Down Below by Leonora Carrington, Music Is Dangerous by Paul Nougé, It’s in the Wind by Nancy Joyce Peters, and more. Contact had been established with Philip Lamantia and Nancy Joyce Peters, and they joined the surrealist movement while remaining in San Francisco. Lamantia, who had met Breton in the 1940s, contributed his dazzling poetry and a thoughtful critique of modern poetry; Peters brought beautiful creative work and also a discussion of women and surrealism that has not been surpassed. We worked on a surrealist section of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Anthology, beginning with a manifesto, “The Lighthouse of the Future.”6 It predicted a surrealist future—and we realized that it was up to us to make that future happen. Participating was an energetic group in their twenties from Columbus, Ohio, who soon joined us in Chicago: Jean-Jacques J. Dauben, Ronald Papp, Timothy Johnson, and Jocelyn Koslofsky. Their collective activity helped make it possible to realize the World Surrealist Exhibition in 1976. Thanks to the splits of the Paris group, this show would not have been possible without the help of Édouard Jaguer, Elisa Breton, and Mimi Parent. Thom Burns from Glenview and Brooke and Janine Rothwell from Miami also moved to Chicago, and their help was indispensable. From San Francisco, V. Vale attended and filmed the show—this was before he started Search & Destroy or the amazing RE/Search Publications. The bold work of Vale’s partner in life, filmmaker Marian Wallace, was part of a show at San Francisco’s Emerald Tablet Gallery, as was that of Winston Smith, whose joyful black humor and insanely busy mind made him one of the greatest collagists ever— better than Max Ernst ever was. The Emerald Tablet show also included Beth Garon’s perspective-bending magical works and works by Dennis Cunningham and myself. Way back in 1968, Cunningham lived across from Solidarity Bookshop on Larrabee Street. The window was broken, and we replaced it with a giant-sized “Au Grand Jour” statement by René Crevel. A regular at Solidarity, Cunningham produced surrealist objects as a passion. However, he became an attorney; a founder of the People’s Law Office, he defended Black Panther Fred Hampton, Attica prisoners, and later Earth First!’s Judi Bari—all the while putting together surrealist objects unknown to most. Not too long ago, on a beautiful summer day, we met by chance at Michael James’s Heartland Café. Cunningham’s daughter, Miranda Mellis, writes surrealist stories. One of her latest books is None of This Is Real. The high point of the 1970s, our exhibition Marvelous Freedom, opened in May 1976 in a huge 1890s trolley barn and included more than six hundred works by 150 surrealists living in thirty-one different countries—this gives an idea of the reach of surrealism. 67

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Blues shows featured Honeyboy Edwards and Eddie Shaw, and there were performances by the AACM’s Sun Song jazz ensemble (Gloria Brooks, Hamid Drake, Douglas Ewart, James Johnson, Rrata Christine Jones, George Lewis, and Reggie Willis), a Viking ship built by Finn Thompson, and a movie by Arrabal.7 A news article claimed that “it was more of an event or confrontation than orthodox art show.”8 From Australia, Michael Vandelaar sent works and stayed in Chicago for weeks. Works from Portugal, parallel collage games from France, and photos and paintings from New Orleans, including those by Clarence John Laughlin, were also exhibited. By chance, we discovered that a fellow surrealist lived down the block from us on Howe Street: Tristan Meinecke produced gigantic shadow boxes. Meeting Angel Casey, his wife, produced a sense of déjà vu. As she was host of a children’s TV show in the 1950s, I had seen her every day on TV showing movies of Chaplin and Keaton, so I owed my early love of silent comics to her. Robert Green was the major organizer and architect of our cavernous space for the World Surrealist Exhibition. Franklin Rosemont coordinated correspondence and wrote the introduction to the extensive catalog Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire, and articles came from surrealists around the world.9 A third issue of our journal Arsenal came out simultaneously. Cecil Taylor attended the opening, as did E. F. Granell, Amparo Granell, Mario Cesariny, Michael Vandelaar, Alice Mayoux, Dennis Brutus, Barbara Crane, Arnold Crane, and even Frank Sinatra. Gerome Kamrowski was there—he had known Breton in New York, and it was he who designed the centerpiece of the exhibition, a huge installation that displayed his giant, gaudy, multicolored animals. There were eleven other installations, called “Domains of Surrealist Vigilance”: Alice, Bugs Bunny, Duchess of Towers, Fantômas, Juliette, Doctor Faustroll, Harpo Marx, Melmoth the Wanderer, Peetie Wheatstraw, Robin Hood, and T-Bone Slim. Art critic Alan Artner referred to it as the “scene of an explosion.”10 It was over-the-top excessive. No gallery would have had the courage or the time to do anything like it except one run by surrealists themselves (see color plate 6). The landlord threw us out after a year. The group Rebel Women joined our cause, and they came with a high level of commitment and accomplishment. The African American Jayne Cortez, the greatest surrealist poet of our time—her rage was one with liberation—established her own publishing house, Bola Press, and possessed her own powerful, beyond-our-galaxy voice; her readings would shake up and remap your mind. Rikki Ducornet began to publish her fantastic stories and novels in the softest, most incredible and seductive language. Her very first story, “Clean,” was written for Arsenal. Nancy Joyce Peters, an outstanding surrealist theorist, brought the depth of her consciousness to our project, writing essays and poetry, making drawings and paintings; she was and still is a moving force at City Lights. Alice Farley bent the principles of dance until they screamed surrealism. Others in the US group—Lucy Surrealist Solidarity

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Catlett, Jocelyn Koslofsky, Debra Taub, Beth Garon, Mado Speigler, Louise Hudson, and Janine Rothwell—participated and pursued their own creative expression. A major outside influence and role model was the dynamic Diane di Prima, whose amazing Revolutionary Letters had just appeared in print. Carrington’s work was a key influence in both art and writing, and her book Down Below and essay “What Is a Woman?” expressed our crisis as creative women with unconventional thinking and the desire to be our own persons and lovers, too.11 Emma Goldman was a significant influence from the past, giving us our anarchist roots. And now we found Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary by Carolyn Ashbaugh. The encounter with Ashbaugh at Red Rose Bookstore in Rogers Park led to a longtime commitment to Chicago’s Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, where we printed essays by Lucy Parsons edited by Gale Ahrens.12 Surrealist scandal and intervention had not gone out of style, though actions snowballed, often by accident. When I attempted to improve an installation piece by Andrea Blum by adding some footprints, I was kicked out of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Accused of spoiling the artwork, I countered, “It’s only a pile of dirt.” In tears, Andrea Blum replied, “But it’s my pile of dirt!” Ah, art. Another oddball event took place at the dedication of Claes Oldenburg’s Batcolumn in April 1977. The group responsible here was the same group that put together the World Surrealist Exhibition: Robert Green, Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, JeanJacques J. Dauben, Ron Papp, and Thom Burns (see fig. 3.2). While celebrities gathered on the platform, I was dragged off by the police in front of TV cameras for the crime of passing out leaflets. The officer told me, “No free speech today!” but I didn’t believe him—what could be wrong with passing out a leaflet? My fellow surrealists were outraged and began yelling, waving their signs and giving indications that they were in the mood for some good old ’60s-style rioting. As a result, three of us were arrested: the often-arrested surrealist militant Robert Green, the visiting San Francisco surrealist poet Laurence Weisberg, and myself. The handsome Weisberg made the front page of the Tribune being roughed up by police. Roger Simon did a riotously funny article for the Sun-Times.13 My relatives recognized me on TV. People magazine featured a sign of ours being held by a homeless man, apparently in an effort of support and to give the police the impression that there were more than seven of us there. The sign read, “Funny, isn’t it?” No one was bothered by who carried this sign. It seemed to confer an odd immunity: apparently, no cop wanted his picture in the paper roughing up someone holding a sign that read, “Funny, isn’t it?” The New Yorker mentioned it. It was through Red Rose Bookstore that we were to meet surrealists David Roediger and Joel Williams. Williams, a prolific experimental collagist who had come to the World Surrealist Exhibition, had a reputation for coming into the store and buying all 69

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Fig. 3.2  Participants in the World Surrealist Exhibition of 1976: (back row, from left) Finn Thompson, Debra Taub, Robert Green, Ronald Papp, Thom Burns, Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, Paul Garon, and (front row, from left) Maya, Timothy Johnson, Jean-Jacques J. Dauben, Janine Rothwell, Brooke Rothwell. Photo by Playboy photographer Alexis Urba. Reproduced with permission from the personal archives of Penelope Rosemont.

our publications. Roediger, then attending Northwestern University, is a historian well known for his books on race and whiteness, beginning with The Wages of Whiteness. As surrealists and radicals, we saw a need for political action and formed a broadbased group called Workers Defense. We produced leaflets and newsletters and even a concert, “Rock Against Racism.” We were in touch with and defended striking miners in Indiana. But the main focus of our activity was anti-Nazi, as at this time there was a group led by Frank Collin that styled themselves Nazis and planned marches in Marquette Park and Skokie, taking advantage of police protection. Thanks to organizing work and the participation of hundreds who joined our campaign, the Nazis were not able to practice their tactics of intimidation and soon fell apart. It was here that we encountered Noel Ignatiev, the beginning of a long friendship and collaboration. Surrealist exhibitions were organized for the Hyde Park Art Center, the Gary Art Center (where Henry Darger’s works made their debut), and Milwaukee’s Ozaukee Art Center in 1977. This last exhibition was dubbed a Tribute to the 100th Anniversary of Hysteria. Ribitch and Sharon arrived from the West Coast and did a large part of the work. Clarence John Laughlin and Franklin Rosemont had been among the first to see the newly discovered Darger works, which had been found in a small apartment a block from Roma’s, the restaurant where the surrealists met. Surrealist Solidarity

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Another scandal occurred when it came to our attention that Robert Bly, a pig of a poet, was to read at the Body Politic; Bly had recently insulted Octavio Paz. Most of the group showed up at the reading. Dauben, Burns, and Papp had planned an action inspired by the Marx Brothers. Here is how the Chicago Reader described it: Everything was going nicely for poet Robert Bly. There was a packed house at the Body Politic. . . . Suddenly, shockingly, Bly was pelted in the face with a cream cake, squirted with shaving cream, doused in egg and flour, shoved around, and taunted. . . . After the surprise wore off attendees came to Bly’s rescue, jumping on the attackers and then unknowingly on each other . . . a rip-roaring brawl was in full fury. [The set background was by chance an Old West saloon.] It all seemed like something out of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. The hit men, members of a rather bizarre group called the Chicago surrealists. And you thought poetry readings were dull.14

They forgot to mention that Ron Papp was furiously playing the old upright piano on stage. By the time I exited, Green had already been handcuffed and was about to be tossed into the police wagon when Paul Garon, with a black eye, managed to negotiate his release. A neighbor quipped, “I never go to poetry readings; they’re too dangerous.” At a New York book fair in 1978, Ted Joans, by chance, found us at a table where we were selling Arsenal. He took us over to meet Jayne Cortez and Mel Edwards at their apartment. We had a wonderful time! During that trip we stayed at the Chelsea Hotel; the night before we left, Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. Our group dynamic changed as Timothy Johnson became depressed. The dynamic couple Jocelyn and Jack Dauben split up. Mado Speigler left her husband and later broke up with Paul Garon. Franklin’s father died; his mother became hysterical. A handsome Irishman moved into her attic; he was a fan of the Irish Republican Army. Jack and Ron bought Western hats and headed west in Paul Garon’s Volkswagen. Thom Burns left for San Francisco. Jack’s exmilitary brother was involved in a murder. In 1978, with Elisa Breton’s help, Franklin Rosemont edited a massive book of Breton’s writings under the title What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, which has been continuously in print ever since. In his introduction, Rosemont wrote: Dispelling the mirage of futility, traversing the mirror of fatality, surrealism is resolved to stop at nothing. It cannot be emphasized too strongly: surrealism, a unitary project of total revolution, is above all a method of knowledge and a way of life; it is lived far more than it is written, or written about, or drawn. Surrealism is the most exhilarating adventure of the mind, an unparalleled means of pursuing the fervent quest for freedom and true life beyond the veil of ideological appearances. Only the social revolution, the leap, in the celebrated expression of Marx and Engels, “from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom,” will enable the true life of poetry and mad love to 71

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cast aside definitively, the fetters of degradation and dishonor and to flourish with unrestrained splendor. Vainly will one search in Surrealism for a motive inconsistent with this fundamental aspiration. “Human emancipation,” wrote André Breton in Nadja, “remains the only cause worth serving.” For the surrealists, surrealism remains precisely the best means of serving that cause.15

A surrealist group formed in England in 1979 that included Stephan Kukowski, Adam Czarnowski, Michael Richardson, John Welson, and others, among them our friend Conroy Maddox. Bertha Husband and Mari Jo Marchnight started Axe Street Arena in Chicago, a surrealist venue. Ron Sakolsky began his surrealist journey. In New Orleans,

John Clark and others found surrealism in New Orleans, a preeminently surrealist city.16 With Paul Buhle’s encouragement, surrealists were inspired to put together an issue of Buhle’s journal Cultural Correspondence titled “Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices.” A collection of everything we enthusiastically celebrated in popular culture, cartoons, movies, and music, joyous and goofy, it was soon out of print but was later reissued by City Lights (see color plate 7). Surrealists, with our friend Paul Buhle, were to edit Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination, which was published by City Lights thanks to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy Joyce Peters. The author of A Coney Island of the Mind knew what surrealism was about and lent his support. Nancy Joyce Peters knew our heart. Adventure, discovery, revelation: exuberant and expansive, the 1970s was a fantastic period of accomplishment for surrealists in the United States and internationally. The dominant spirit was that of passional attraction, electric encounters, cooperation, mutual aid, and inspiration, punctuated occasionally by disaster; the genius of a surrealist group is its ability to bring out the extraordinary in its individuals. All in all, it was overflowing with energy, positive and negative, impossible to portray, difficult to catalog, a great surrealist moment. It proved that surrealism is not dependent on time, on place, or even on special persons; where one leaves off, another begins, ever changing, ever enchanting, ever creating—always in the spirit of poetry, love and freedom—and that is the great secret of surrealism. Notes 1. For in-depth discussion and documents, see Sakolsky, Surrealist Subversions; Rosemont, Rosemont, and Garon, Forecast Is Hot; Rosemont, “Surrealism in the ’70s”; Rosemont, “Make Love; Not War!” The Franklin and Penelope Rosemont Papers are at the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection, Ann Arbor, MI. 2. Rosemont, “Introduction to 1970,” 1. 3. See both volumes of Pierre, Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives. 4. See Rosemont, Lost Worlds, Forgotten Futures. 5. Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit, 107. Surrealist Solidarity

6. Ferlinghetti, City Lights Anthology, 203–6. 7. The AACM is the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, founded in Chicago in 1965. 8. Artner, “Surrealistic Treasure Hunt.” 9. See Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire. 10. Artner, “Surrealistic Treasure Hunt.” 11. Leonora Carrington, “What Is a Woman?,” in Rosemont, Surrealism and Women, 372–75. 12. See, for example, Parsons, Freedom, Equality, and Solidarity. 13. Simon, “Batty Welcome to Chicago.” 72

14. Chicago Reader, December 10, 1978. The 1970s did not end well. Jocelyn Koslofsky and Jack Dauben split up. Changes in personal dynamics and misunderstandings caused Dauben, Papp, and Thom Burns to depart Chicago. Franklin Rosemont’s father died, and Dauben’s brother was murdered.

15. Rosemont, “André Breton and the First Principles,” 5. 16. See Cafard, Surregional Explorations; Rosemont and Kelley, Black, Brown, and Beige; Löwy, Morning Star; Rosemont et al., Surrealism’s Earthly Visions; Sakolsky, Creating Anarchy; Smith, All Riot on the Western Front.

Bibliography Artner, Alan. “A Surrealistic Treasure Hunt.” Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1976, 8. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)” and “Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930).” In Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 1–48 and 117–94, respectively. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Buhle, Paul, Jayne Cortez, Philip Lamantia, Nancy Joyce Peters, Franklin Rosemont, and Penelope Rosemont, eds. Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination. San Francisco: City Lights, 1982. Cafard, Max. Surregional Explorations. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2012. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, ed. City Lights Anthology. San Francisco: City Lights, 1974. Garon, Paul. Blues and the Poetic Spirit. 1975. San Francisco: City Lights, 1996. ———. Devil’s Son-in-Law: The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw and His Songs. London: Studio Vista, 1971. Rev. and exp. ed., Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2003. Löwy, Michael. Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire. Chicago: Gallery Black Swan, 1976. Exhibition catalog. Parsons, Lucy. Freedom, Equality, and Solidarity. Edited by Gale Ahrens. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2003. Pierre, José, ed. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 1, 1922–1939. Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1980. ———, ed. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 2, 1939–1969. Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1982. Rosemont, Franklin. “André Breton and the First Principles.” In André Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, edited by Franklin Rosemont, 1–139. New York: Monad Press, 1978. ———. “Introduction to 1970.” In “Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution,” edited by Franklin Rosemont. Special issue, Radical America 4 (January 1970): 1–3. ———, ed. Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices. San Francisco: City Lights, 1980.

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Rosemont, Franklin, and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds. Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Rosemont, Franklin, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon, eds. The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts and Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, 1966–1976. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997. Rosemont, Penelope. Lost Worlds, Forgotten Futures, Undreamed Ecstasies: Some Thoughts on the Relationship of Surrealism to the Mayan Millennium and to Each His Own Pluriverse. Surrealist Research and Development Monograph Series, new ser., no. 2. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2012. ———. “Make Love; Not War! and the Spirit of the Times.” Fifth Estate, no. 394 (Summer 2015): unpaginated. ———. Surrealism and Women. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. ———. Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. San Francisco: City Lights, 2019. ———. “Surrealism in the ’70s: A Reply to Allan Graubard.” Rain Taxi 19, no. 1 (2014): unpaginated. Rosemont, Penelope, Winston Smith, Dennis Cunningham, Marian Wallace, and Beth Garon. Surrealism’s Earthly Visions: Carnivorous Flowers of Volcanic Thought. San Francisco: Emerald Tablet, 2013. Sakolsky, Ron. Creating Anarchy. Berkeley: Ardent Press, 2013. ———, ed. Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings, and Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2002. Simon, Roger. “A Batty Welcome to Chicago.” Chicago Sun-Times, April 15, 1977, 6. Smith, Winston. All Riot on the Western Front. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2004. Vries, Her de, and Laurens Vancrevel, eds. What Will Be / Ce qui sera. Amsterdam: Brumes Blondes, 2014.

Angry, Hopeful Chaos and the Great Secret of Surrealism

Passionate Attraction

Fourier, Feminism, Free Love, and L’Écart absolu

Claire Howard

4.

Approximately twenty-five hundred people attended the opening of the international surrealist exhibition L’Écart absolu, at Galerie de l’Œil in Paris on December 7, 1965.1 The exhibition took its cryptic title from the principle of “absolute deviation” espoused by French utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837) in his 1808 treatise Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales (The Theory of the Four Movements and of the General Destinies). André Breton explained this principle in his catalog introduction as the demand that all established ideas and institutions be avoided.2 The group statement “Tranchons-en” elaborated, describing L’Écart absolu as an “ideological whole,” a “‘combative’ exhibition, which directly confronts the most intolerable aspects of the society in which we live,” particularly the inescapable manifestations of postwar consumerism.3 Collective artworks created for the exhibition and catalog essays by J.-F. Revel, Philippe Audoin, and Jean Schuster extended this Fourierist critique to issues of the day, rejecting the subjugation of pleasure to commercialized leisure, the rise of technocracy, consumerism’s creation of false

needs through omnipresent advertising, and capitalism’s substitution of false ideas of happiness for the real thing.4 Fourier’s economic critique is, however, inseparable from his condemnation of the status of women and sexual relations in modern civilization. His writing on women’s equality and sexual liberation in Théorie des quatre mouvements and the recently rediscovered Le nouveau monde amoureux (The New Amorous World, 1817–18) shaped surrealist attitudes, particularly as manifested in this exhibition. By examining Fourier’s ideas, surrealist commentary on sexuality and women’s roles, and L’Écart absolu’s embrace of these intertwining issues, this chapter explores how surrealists reinterpreted Fourier after World War II. Contextualizing Fourier and L’Écart absolu within broader cultural conversations—particularly considering new, younger surrealists’ perspectives—in the years leading up to the events of May 1968 sheds light on surrealism’s continued relevance to 1960s counterculture.

The Consumer: Surrealism, Fourier, and Women’s Equality Fourier was the most prominent philosophical touchstone for surrealism in its later decades. In 1945, Breton wrote his Ode à Charles Fourier while he traveled across the southwestern United States and visited Native American reservations, the trip on which he married his third wife, Elisa Claro.5 The Ode meditates in a postwar context on Fourier’s vision for a new society, which he called “Harmony.” Breton contrasts Harmony’s described unity with the discord wrought by World War II and bemoans civilization’s lack of progress: “Fourier it’s all too depressing to see them emerging from / one of the worst cess-pools of history / Infatuated with the maze that leads back to it / Impatient to start all over again for a better jump.” Breton endorses Fourier’s method of écart absolu in approaching conventions as small as punctuation or musical notation, “because it’s the whole world that must not only be overturned but prodded everywhere in its conventions / And there’s no control lever to be trusted once and for all.”6 As Fabrice Flahutez states, Fourier was a philosopher to be studied not just for inspiration but also for confirmation of Breton’s worldview.7 In place of capitalist society, Fourier proposed a means of social organization that would allow individuals to be both happy and productive. According to Fourier, modern civilization had been built on repression of humans’ instinctual “passions,” with disastrous results.8 He proposed that “harmonizing” individuals’ passions would allow people to find enjoyment in socially beneficial, “attractive” work. Fourier rigorously categorized and balanced the passions according to a mathematical model; this “passionate series” was to structure society in Harmony as well.9 While civilization deemed certain passions vices and insisted upon their repression, Harmony would put these drives to free and good use. “The most peaceful and productive society would be the one that allowed the greatest scope for the expression of individual desire,” Jonathan Beecher writes. “The perfect hedonist was necessarily the perfect Harmonian.”10 Fourier’s pre-Stalinist form of socialism may have been part of his appeal to the surrealists, as they sought new guiding lights in their postwar pursuit of the “total liberation of humanity.”11 Likewise, Fourier’s discussions of repression and desire seem to anticipate the writings of surrealism’s earliest inspiration, Sigmund Freud. Yet, as Beecher notes, Fourier’s body of work is highly complex and grounded in his own time. He developed the broad strokes of his social critique during the decade of the French Revolution, though it would be several more years before he elaborated his theory of the passions (1806), plans for his ideal community (1805–8), cosmology (after 1814), and dream of a sexually enlightened society (1817–18). Fourier’s twin theories of absolute doubt and absolute deviation were central to his critical stance, a wholesale “rejection of the society in which he lived,” as Beecher describes it.12 “The method of Doubt must be applied to civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence and its permanence,” Fourier wrote.13 77

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The surrealists responded as well to Fourier’s imaginative vision and attempted to bring greater attention to this aspect of his work. Not only had Fourier’s reputation declined in the twentieth century, but his intellectual legacy had been distorted. His followers selectively published his works after his death, emphasizing his economic critique and theories of labor and suppressing his writing on sexual liberation and cosmology.14 “Fourier is immense,” Breton commented in 1946, “and my greatest ambition is to stem the tide of oblivion that has engulfed him.”15 Breton subsequently proposed reissuing Fourier’s work in his capacity as editor-at-large for Gallimard, and Fourier’s work appeared often in surrealist publications.16 The 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition catalog reprinted an excerpt of Fourier’s Traité de l’association domestique-agricole (Treatise on Domestic Agricultural Association, 1822) on the androgyny of the planets, part of his extensive theory of analogies between the human and astronomical realms. Articles by Adrien Dax, Philippe Audoin, and Emile Lehoucq in the surrealist journal La brèche: Action surréaliste (1961–65) addressed Fourier’s occult symbolism and word games.17 The December 1964 issue of La brèche published a “censored manuscript” by Fourier, “L’Archibras,” with an introduction by Beecher, then a young American scholar studying in France who had discovered Fourier’s manuscript in the Archives Nationales.18 “L’Archibras” describes the appendage that fully free people would develop in Fourier’s ultimate phase of human history. While Fourier’s disciples removed the essay from his published works, the surrealists embraced the fantastic elements of Fourier’s oeuvre and even titled their subsequent magazine L’Archibras (1967–69). As Donald LaCoss notes, “It was not surrealists’ belief in the practicality of the utopian mythologies of Fourier’s peculiar socialism that led them to advance his schemes.” Rather, Fourier’s subversive writings “were hailed by the surrealists for their potentially liberating effect on the imagination, and their ability to do so in a way that far exceeded any of the other available remedies of the day which insisted on closed political systems.”19 Fourier mounted his critique of civilization’s treatment of women in his early writings, based on his observation that “the extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress.”20 Fourier’s conception of history is defined by the status of women in each period, including the free pursuit of desires by men and women in the earliest period of Edenism, the cataclysmic “absolute servitude of women” in the “Patriarchate” and “Barbarism” periods, the repression and wifely duties of marriage in present-day “Civilization,” and the “amorous corporation” and sexual freedom of “Guaranteeism” en route to utopian Harmony.21 For Fourier, the family unit and monogamous marriage were hallmarks of a repressive and unnatural modern civilization and were particularly harmful to women. He described marriage as a corrupt commercial transaction, asking, “Is not a young woman a piece of merchandise put up for sale to the highest bidder?”22 Echoing his economic Against the Liquidators

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critique, Fourier charged that women’s housework was not based on skill or affinity and was thus exploitive and unenjoyable. Conjugal love was marked by the same sense of obligation that drained mystery and pleasure from sex and failed to satisfy spouses’ desires.23 In Harmony, women’s equality would be at the center of a reconfigured set of human relations meticulously designed to meet the needs—material and sexual—of every member of the group. The collective artwork Le consommateur (The Consumer), produced for L’Écart absolu, represented the intersection of the exhibition’s anticonsumerism and Fourier’s criticisms of marriage and women’s domestic roles. Jean-Claude Silbermann assembled the nearly twelve-foot-tall collection of everyday objects and appliances, suggested by Breton and others, within a cruciform structure upholstered like a pink tufted mattress.24 Le consommateur produced an anthropomorphic effect; while a siren at its top blared taxi radio static, a television for a face and a washing machine as a stomach embodied the new domestic gadgetry pursued by consumers.25 On the other side of the mattress were a license plate reading “HT 110QT”—or “Achetez sans discuter” (“buy without discussing”)—and a refrigerator interior, from which dangled a wedding gown, veil, and white shoes, as if the appliance had swallowed a bride whole (see color plate 8).26 This suggests both the consumption of the housewife by the very tools intended to free her, and the institution of marriage as a unit of consumption. Both interpretations evoke Fourier’s scathing descriptions of women’s relegation to household drudgery and the exploitive economic bases of marriage as exemplars of civilization’s failure. Le consommateur’s incorporation of modern technology updated Fourier’s social commentary. Advances made during World War II in women’s suffrage, education, and employment were to be a “dubious emancipation,” Claire Laubier writes, as conservative policies “ensured [women’s] inferior status well into the 1950s and 1960s.”27 Simultaneously, postwar economic growth made France a full-blown consumer society, ushering in an age of increased productivity and technical advances, the rise of advertising and media, and urbanization.28 The Gaullist couple became a consuming unit in their quest to furnish their household, as described in Christiane Rochefort’s novel Les petits enfants du siècle (1961), in which a husband and wife fight over whether to buy a car (his preference) or a refrigerator (hers) with their next government childbirth allocation. Though household appliances were marketed as amis de la femme, aids to homemakers, Kristin Ross argues that they did not save housewives time but only encouraged them to take on more chores.29 March 1965 also brought significant changes to French marriage laws, which had previously favored husbands. Wives received full ownership privileges over their property and the right to make decisions regarding household administration and the education of children. They could now open their own bank accounts and seek employment without 79

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their husbands’ consent.30 In this context, Alyce Mahon argues, Le consommateur suggests the false freedom that purchasing power and recent legislation conveyed, while women remained tied to domestic roles within marriage and the family unit.31 In 1965, aspects of the critique Fourier had leveled at the treatment of women in his day still rang true.

Woman Seen from the Surrealist Perspective Though Breton announced L’Écart absolu in his April 1964 statement “Surrealism Continues,” the exhibition did not open until December of the following year.32 This period of latency allowed a reconceptualization of the exhibition in response to new cultural dialogues. Breton originally proposed that L’Écart absolu take the theme of “la femme selon l’optique surréaliste” (woman seen from the surrealist perspective). In a June 1964 meeting with Vincent Bounoure, Radovan Ivšić, Joyce Mansour, and José Pierre, Breton suggested installing a tree with the silhouette of a woman affixed to its trunk and various symbols related to women hanging from its branches. The exhibition’s ambitious proposal surveyed depictions of women in poetry, popular culture, and art from antiquity to the present, and was to include historical and contemporary surrealists such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Jean Benoît, and Toyen. A special issue of the magazine L’Œil would also examine representations of women, including a comparison of women in the eighteenth century and the “modern style” woman.33 Perhaps influenced by contemporary philosophies of the “everyday,” the younger surrealists at the meeting countered Breton’s “woman” with the theme of consumerism. Breton proposed as a compromise the model of Fourier’s “absolute deviation,” and “woman” became a subtheme of the larger exploration of consumer society.34 Fourier’s theories therefore bridged Breton’s poetic, mythic, and historical emphasis and the present-day concerns of younger members. Breton’s discovery of Fourier prompted the poet to reflect deeply on women’s place in the world. Through Fourier, Breton discovered the early French feminist and Fourierist Flora Tristan, who, Breton proclaimed in Arcane 17 (1944), was, like Fourier, unfairly overlooked, to society’s detriment. This work celebrates the liberation of Paris and Breton’s new love, Elisa, via the mythic figure of Mélusine, as a “child-woman.” Breton stresses the importance of a “female principle” in society’s rebirth, describing women as an elemental counterweight to the corruption of civilization.35 The mythic Mélusine—half woman, half serpent—becomes symbolic of women in contemporary society, marginalized but in deeper contact with nature.36 Breton calls for artists to “appropriate” and prioritize a distinctly feminine outlook in order to heal society, but he also demands further action: “Those of us in the arts must pronounce ourselves unequivocally against man and for woman, bring man down from a position of power which, it has been sufficiently Against the Liquidators

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demonstrated, he has misused, restore this power to the hands of woman, dismiss all of man’s pleas so long as woman has not yet succeeded in taking back her fair share of that power, not only in art but in life.”37 Breton’s appeal echoes Fourier’s rejection of male dominance in society. In Théorie des quatre mouvements, Fourier addressed men: “And you, oppressing sex, would you not outdo women in shortcomings if a servile education had molded you to think of yourselves as automatons meant to submit to prejudice and to cringe before a master whom chance has imposed on you?”38 The unequal status of women in civilization, Fourier argued, was predicated on their supposed vices (such as deceit and frivolity), which were outcomes of their oppression. Fourier was confident that “woman in a state of liberty will surpass man in all the mental and bodily functions which are not related to physical strength.”39 Like Breton, he advocated more than the “appropriation” of a female viewpoint: in Harmony, women would occupy half of the most prominent positions, “regaining the position assigned to them by nature, that of rivals and not dependents of men.”40 Nonetheless, while women in Harmony received equal education and status, many of their tasks were stereotypically gendered, such as perfumery and dressmaking.41 Five years after Breton published Arcane 17, Simone de Beauvoir published Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) (1949), a watershed in the reconceptualization and elucidation of women’s position as Other in society. For the surrealists, she charged, women functioned like the poetic objects—“the spoon-shoe, the table-wolf, the marble-sugar”—that inspire male creativity, without exercising any power of their own: “Breton does not speak of woman as subject.”42 In light of the cultural impact of her work, Beauvoir played a significant, though often unacknowledged, role in surrealist writing on women as late as L’Écart absolu. The tensions and overlap between her thinking, Breton’s, and Fourier’s reveal problematic aspects of Fourier’s writing on women and its interpretation by surrealists old and young. Beauvoir accuses Breton of positioning the mythic child-woman of Arcane 17 as not only one man’s inspiration and salvation but all of humanity’s. Breton’s recognition of the male dominance of society is mitigated, in Beauvoir’s view, by his insistence that women play a pacifying role. In Breton’s essentializing position, she writes, the supposed “power” of the child-woman’s closeness to nature renders her “key to the beyond. Truth, Beauty, Poetry—she is All: once more all under the form of the Other, All except herself.”43 Elsewhere in Le deuxième sexe, Beauvoir hails utopian socialism’s envisioned “utopia of the ‘free woman,’” but criticizes Fourier’s further theorizations. Fourier, she writes, “confused the emancipation of women with the rehabilitation of the flesh, demanding for every individual the right to yield to the call of passion and wishing to replace marriage with love; he considered woman not as a person but only in her amorous function.” Breton likewise “exalts woman as erotic object.”44 These indictments of Breton and 81

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Fourier conditioned the surrealists’ negative responses to Beauvoir’s work. In the Écart absolu catalog, Philippe Audoin referred to “the absurd invention of the ‘second sex’” and reversed Beauvoir’s charge against Fourier and Breton, accusing her of robbing women of pleasure by denying their amorous function.45 Beauvoir, Breton, and Fourier agreed, however, that women were formed by the very society that maintained their oppression. In Arcane 17, Breton rejects the masculine view of women, writing, “First woman must find herself, must, without man’s more than problematical help, learn to recognize herself through the hells to which she is doomed by the view that man, in general, has of her.”46 Beauvoir similarly argues that any feminine faults were not attributable to an “originally perverted essence or will: they reflect a situation” and were fostered by “paternalistic oppression.”47 Beauvoir cites Fourier as sharing this sentiment; indeed, he writes, “Women can reply to philosophers: Your Civilization persecutes us when we obey Nature; it obliges us to assume an artificial personality, to behave in ways that are contrary to our desires.”48 Nonetheless, Fourier and Beauvoir differ significantly on the nature of femininity. Beauvoir viewed women’s differences from men as solely the results of social conditions, while Fourier believed in an essential femininity—the cosmic opposite of masculinity—underlying the distorting power of civilization. Ending civilization’s oppression of women would therefore return the “natural” masculine-feminine balance.49 The exchange between Breton and the younger surrealists regarding “woman seen from the surrealist perspective” signals this same tension between a romantic, essential woman and socially produced woman in surrealist thought. These competing impulses are apparent in L’Écart absolu’s representation of women. The collective installation Désordinateur (Dis-Computer, or Disorganizer) was designed by Pierre Faucheux for L’Écart absolu. It took the form of a display case with ten compartments containing symbolic objects—an attempt, the catalog stated, to “render what might become of the essential components of the principle of reality caught in the very moment of its realization, when those components are subjected to the method of L’Écart absolu.”50 Each compartment could be illuminated by pressing one of ten buttons, labeled with a social issue, on a control panel in front of the case. Catalog essays explored the objects’ representation of themes such as space exploration, the rise of technocracy, advertising’s conquest of public space, and the nationalistic obsession with sports (see color plate 9).51 The work’s seventh compartment, “Femme modern style,” featured a bust of a topless woman, conjuring Breton’s original proposal. Pierre’s accompanying essay, “Changer la femme,” alludes to women’s recent legal and economic gains. Pierre writes that Alfred Jarry and the Marquis de Sade’s heroines, by rejecting passive acquiescence to male desires in the social and sexual spheres, suggest a way for modern career women to Against the Liquidators

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deliver themselves from the physical and moral “guardianship” of men. These authors, he states, realized that only after women’s complete sexual emancipation could their “infinite servitude” be broken, echoing Fourier’s insistence that women’s sexual and social liberation go hand in hand.52 Without naming Beauvoir, Pierre pointedly evokes her criticism of the child-woman fantasy. Jarry, Sade, and Rimbaud, he argues, offer visions that attempt, “bit by bit, to put together the true face of woman, not in order to impose it upon her like a ‘ready to wear’ garment, but to help her to liberate herself at last.”53 Like Audoin, Pierre paints Beauvoir as herself oppressive; it is not the poets of today or yesterday who prevent the enfranchisement of women, he writes, but those who delay it “under the sad tinsel of their ‘cause.’” Pierre rejects any one role for women, other than the depicted “uniform of her dazzling nudity” (the compartment’s button was labeled “woman in uniform”).54 Pierre defends Breton against Beauvoir’s charges by acclaiming (male) poets’ role in women’s emancipation. While he stresses their unique humanity rather than a feminine essence, Pierre remains focused on women’s physical and sexual attributes. Such contradictions suggest surrealism’s—and Fourier’s—complicated legacy for feminism. Wounded by her critique, surrealists like Pierre and Audoin ridiculed Beauvoir’s position as antisex, revealing the limits of their understanding of her text’s ambitious phenomenology.55 Their conflation of women’s sexual liberation and social equality reflects their debt to Fourier and the inseparability of these issues in his work. Sex was, however, an increasingly social phenomenon in the culture of the 1960s. L’Écart absolu rejected commodified relations and reproductive imperatives to espouse the free practice of love described by Fourier, encompassing diverse tastes and collective unions.

Free Love Versus “Functional Eroticism”: Fourier, Sex, and Surrealism Crucial to the formation of surrealist ideas of eroticism in the late 1950s and early 1960s was Fourier’s Le nouveau monde amoureux, then being assembled by Simone Debout from manuscripts in the Archives Nationales. Fourier’s antimarriage stance, first established as part of his critique of civilization, became the basis of this radical rethinking of sexual relationships and their role in society. Part treatise, part fantasy narrative, Le nouveau monde amoureux provides extensive description and explanation of sexual relations in Harmony. In order to attract a wider audience, Fourier never published this subversive text, and his followers suppressed it after his death. Its eventual publication in 1967 as volume 7 of Fourier’s complete works coincided with the ferment of the sexual revolution. Beecher stresses the significance of the discovery of Le nouveau monde amoureux, writing that the book makes clear that “the vision of instinctual liberation stands at the center of Fourier’s thinking and that the view of Fourier as chiefly an economic thinker or as a 83

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precursor of socialism cannot account for the richness of his doctrine or the nature of his radicalism.”56 Breton’s working relationship with Debout allowed the surrealists access to Le nouveau monde amoureux as early as 1959.57 That year’s Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) took eroticism as its theme. The catalog reprinted selections from the Nouveau monde amoureux manuscripts on polygamy, “omnigamy,” and sociosexual relations in the new amorous world.58 In her introduction, Debout provides an overview of the unfettered eroticism integral to the society Fourier envisioned and notes that women play the same revolutionary role in Fourier’s thinking that the proletariat did in that of Marx.59 In Fourier’s ideal society, Debout writes, women would no longer be the objects of capitalist exchange that they are in our civilization; the end of the “disorder” of marriage would mean the end of both the “mastery” of men and the “alienation” of women. Introducing Fourier’s notions of the polygyne and omnigyne (individuals possessing multiple passions or all twelve passions, respectively), Debout describes the freedom and variety of sensual opportunities in Harmony, including the visually gratifying “museum orgy.” Just as the natural world is complex, Debout explains, so too are human desires. Fourier insists that drives be coordinated and harmonized to assure that no one type of love become dominant and that all individual capacities are fully developed; this fulfillment leads to the improvement of society as a whole. Fourier’s erotic texts were introduced to the surrealists and their audience as closely linked to women’s equality, revolutionary socialism, sexual liberation, and exhibition theory, themes that reappeared in the 1965 exhibition. In L’Écart absolu, the surrealists took a Fourierist stand against what they termed “functional eroticism.”60 Compartment no. 3 of the Désordinateur, “Roi de rats,” featured a group of stuffed rats bound together by their tails, with a button labeled “natalism.” The corresponding essay by Raymond Borde, “Nous voulons un enfant” (We want a child), alluded to contemporary fears of overpopulation and Gaullist policies meant to increase the birthrate, and described women as maternal laborers within the intertwined systems of wedded love and capitalism.61 Ross has written that the state’s promotion of reproduction—supported by family benefits and enforced by the restriction of birth control and ban on abortions—instituted in France a “new ideology of love and conjugality.”62 Borde marked surrealism’s separation from these values by contrasting the image of eroticism and pleasure presented in the exhibition by works such as Jean Benoît’s performance Le nécrophile, Wifredo Lam’s and Pierre Molinier’s canvases, and Jean Arp’s sinuous forms, with society’s “singing cradles.”63 Borde’s criticism echoes both Fourier’s and Beauvoir’s charges against marriage and maternity. Beauvoir denounces housework that gives wives “no autonomy . . . is not directly useful to society,” and “produces nothing.” “That the child is the supreme Against the Liquidators

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aim of woman,” she notes, “is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.”64 In his assault on marriage in Le nouveau monde amoureux, Fourier writes that while philosophers “have proscribed in full the passion most able to form social ties, they have restricted amorous ties to the minimum. Their conjugal system allows only the form of love strictly necessary for the propagation of the species and it would be impossible to invent a social order more restrictive of the development of love.”65 In place of monogamous marriage, Fourier proposed a range of polygamous arrangements that would prioritize the “passions” over procreation. Likewise, women would not remain laborers in the conjugal system; the acknowledgment that women have the same sexual appetites and variety of desires as men requires that they be accorded equal social standing. Only with this recognition could both sexes enter the new amorous world.66 Yet the popular dialogue around sex and pleasure in 1965 was shifting drastically, and sexual practices were changing markedly.67 If sexual conservatism marked the immediate post–World War II period, by the time of L’Écart absolu, significant changes in French sexual attitudes were underway, often in conflict with the policies of the conservative de Gaulle regime. While the government touted family values and consumer culture, and the media promoted a romantic and sex-positive vision of love and marriage, public acceptance of premarital sex continued to rise, and surveys in women’s magazines offered a barometer for the new normal in sexual practices. Dagmar Herzog calls the changes that took place in Europe between 1964 and 1968 “profound,” noting that as the gap between popular practice and legislated norms became increasingly visible, opportunities for activism and calls for reform grew.68 Younger surrealists demonstrated engagement with shifting viewpoints on sexuality and society that suggest the contemporary relevance of Fourier’s Nouveau monde amoureux. In 1963, Gérard Legrand contributed to La brèche seven theses in honor of Freud and Norman O. Brown, hailing Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959, published in French as Eros et Thanatos in 1960) as one of the most important books of the postwar period. Legrand relates Brown’s text to the work of both Herbert Marcuse and Fourier in its vision of liberated sexuality versus repressive civilization.69 Though Life Against Death is less well known today than Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), both books’ social analyses resonate with the surrealists’ interest in Fourier and Freud. Fourier’s writings on sexuality and repression made him seem a precursor to Freud, and his extrapolation of these issues onto society at large appealed to theorists such as Marcuse and Brown, who both cited his work as they produced the “radical Freud” of the 1950s and 1960s.70 Brown’s and Marcuse’s fresh interpretations of Freud thus entered into a larger dialogue about sex that was increasingly part of daily life, not only a private matter. In this context, Le nouveau monde amoureux, a 150-yearold manuscript, must have seemed surprisingly timely. 85

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The “Museum Orgy” and Visual Gratification: Fourier, Eroticism, and Surrealist Exhibition Theory Debout introduced Fourier’s concept of the museum orgy in the EROS catalog, describing it as a nude display of Harmony’s most beautiful members. The appreciation of beauty this fosters, she writes, elevates daily life, while the pleasure of contemplation—like the joy offered by art—transcends simple enjoyment.71 Six years later, the back cover of L’Écart absolu’s catalog presented Fourier’s “De l’orgie de musée ou omnigamie mixte en ordre composé et harmonique” (The museum orgy, or mixed omnigamy in compound and harmonic order), an excerpt from Le nouveau monde amoureux, detailing the aesthetic theory behind the museum orgy.72 In a brief commentary, Debout describes the museum orgy as écart absolu and highlights Fourier’s parallels between the museum orgy and art exhibitions.73 Given the prominent position granted Fourier’s essay, it reads like a manifesto for L’Écart absolu on par with the “absolute deviation” of its title, which, though speculative, underscores the surrealists’ commitment to sexual freedom while also reinforcing the exhibition’s function as a Fourierist visual statement. The museum orgy extends the erotic link between art and spectator that Breton suggested in his introduction to the 1959 exhibition catalog: “The fact is that it is here—and here alone—that between exhibitor and spectator, by way of a conveyed disquiet, the organic liaison which is increasingly lacking in the art of today has to be established.” Breton frames the exhibition as “a privileged place, a theater of provocations and prohibitions, in which life’s most profound urges confront one another.” He asserts surrealism’s position at the vanguard of the struggle against shame, repression, and prohibition. “On the threshold of the year 1960,” Breton writes, transgression of social restraints on eroticism is very much “in the air,” noting the recent succès de scandale of the anonymous erotic memoir Emmanuelle (1959), which detailed Emmanuelle’s orgiastic exploits.74 The exhibition theory Breton put forward in 1959, linking the exhibition and visitor via visual-erotic engagement, was thus a timely affirmation of the social power of collective experience that would be heightened in 1965 through the Fourierist emphasis of L’Écart absolu. The museum orgy is only one of several classifications of orgies that Fourier describes in Le nouveau monde amoureux. Beecher writes that love, for Fourier, was an “essential part of the collective life” of Harmony and thus could not be the private, antisocial domain of the monogamous couple.75 Carefully arranged, Harmonian orgies were public events for the whole community that reinforced “the sympathies of each through a common, collective passion, which is a new bond between them all.”76 In Harmony, without the secrecy or excess of prohibition, the coordinated orgy becomes “the noble development of free love.”77 The power of the aesthetic-erotic link in both the museum orgy and the art exhibition would thus lie in their social aspect. Mahon has argued that surrealist exhibitions Against the Liquidators

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demanded visitors’ participation by presenting sensorily charged spaces that engaged the viewer physically, mentally, erotically, and (it was to be hoped) politically, through “collective aesthetic experience.”78 Similarly, Debout writes that the museum orgy integrates the singular and the universal, the isolated and perfect, with the larger group.79 The surrealists sought to re-create this social benefit in their 1965 exhibition: collective consciousness leading to social change, surpassing both the aesthetic and erotic. The universal bond Fourier envisioned as the outcome of Harmony’s orgies likewise anticipates the goals of sexual liberation and unity espoused by the French activists of May 1968.

May 1968: Legacies of Surrealism and Fourier The fourth issue of L’Archibras was published quickly in response to the widespread May ’68 protests in France; it contains invocations of Fourier and Marcuse, rejections of the principle of reality, and messages of support for student demonstrators.80 Protestors’ emphasis on freedom soon led to the interrogation of all aspects of daily life, including family and marriage: students occupying the Sorbonne described the family and the couple as alienating illusions, arguing, “Sexuality and reproduction are two totally different things.”81 High school students issued “Fifteen Theses on the Sexual Revolution,” which criticized marriage as complicit in capitalist property relations.82 As the protest rhetoric suggests, Fourier’s ideas were circulating during this tumultuous period as they had been in surrealism for more than twenty years. Éditions Anthropos’s reprinting of Fourier’s complete works—including Le nouveau monde amoureux—between 1966 and 1968 had allowed them to reach a new and receptive audience. In 1967, the Belgian situationist Raoul Vaneigem included both Fourier and surrealism in his manifesto Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (translated as The Revolution of Everyday Life in 1972). Vaneigem cited Fourier as a touchstone for contemporary counterculture, one of “those who have not yet played their last card in a game which we have only just joined, the great gamble whose stake is freedom.” Vaneigem employed a Fourierist vocabulary of eroticism and repression, describing a “unitary triad” of three “fundamental passions . . . that are to life as the needs for nourishment and shelter are to survival. . . . The desire to create, the desire to love and the desire to play.” He, too, condemned the bourgeoisie’s “imprisoning people’s freedom to love in the squalid ownership of marriage” as a denial of pleasure and commodification of love. Like Fourier, Vaneigem argued for a social understanding of eroticism. He cited Breton’s exhortation, “Lovers, give one another greater and greater pleasure,” as a “truly revolutionary slogan” of the erotic drive for connection with the world at large.83 In the aftermath of the May ’68 protests, on March 10, 1969, activists placed a replica of an 1899 statue of Fourier in its former location near the Place Clichy. Vichy authorities 87

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had removed the original statue during the occupation, and in 1960 Breton had argued that the proposed removal of the statue’s base would further desecrate Fourier’s memory.84 Now, a new generation embraced Fourier, and the Situationist International celebrated Fourier’s return to his rightful pedestal as the ultimate act of détournement.85 Though a contemporary utopia was impossible, Fourier’s Le nouveau monde amoureux and surrealism’s embrace of collective experience echoed in 1968 and beyond. In the aftermath of World War II, the surrealists selected as a philosophical touchstone a nineteenth-century author whose cultural relevance would not be fully felt for another twenty years. Thus, three years before the protests of 1968, the surrealists were once again in the cultural vanguard in their Fourier-inspired calls for women’s equality and sexual liberation. The social positions espoused in L’Écart absolu suggest the ongoing relevance—to postwar culture and the counterculture—of both Fourier and surrealism.

Notes

1. Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 180. 2. André Breton, “Générique,” in L’Écart absolu, unpaginated. 3. “Let’s Get to the Point,” in Richardson and Fijalkowski, Surrealism Against the Current, 55. 4. See J.-F. [Jean-François] Revel, “Jesus Bond contre Docteur Yes”; Philippe Audoin, “L’air de fête”; and Jean Schuster, “Raison sociale décousue main (6. bon appartement chaud),” all in L’Écart absolu, unpaginated. 5. Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 460. 6. Breton, Ode to Charles Fourier, unpaginated. 7. Flahutez, Nouveau monde et nouveau mythe, 445. 8. Beecher, Charles Fourier, 220–37. 9. Ibid., 65–66; Flahutez, Nouveau monde et nouveau mythe, 393. 10. Beecher, Charles Fourier, 240. 11. “Inaugural Rupture,” in Richardson and Fijalkowski, Surrealism Against the Current, 43. 12. Beecher, Charles Fourier, 3–4, 58, 1. 13. Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales: Prospectus et annonce de la découverte, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1846), vol. 1 of Œuvres complètes de Charles Fourier, in Utopian Vision, 95. 14. Beecher, Charles Fourier, 1. 15. Breton, “Interview with Jean Duché,” 207. 16. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 559. 17. See Dax, “A propos d’un talisman”; Lehoucq, “Divertissement linguistique de Fourier”; Audoin, “Talisman de Charles Fourier.”

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18. Beecher, “L’Archibras de Fourier.” I thank Dr. Beecher for generously discussing this essay with me. 19. LaCoss, “Attacks of the Fantastic,” 271. 20. Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements, in Utopian Vision, 196. 21. Fourier, Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, vol. 6 of Œuvres complètes de Charles Fourier, and Théorie des quatre mouvements, both in Utopian Vision, 189, 194. 22. Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements, in Utopian Vision, 177. 23. Beecher, Charles Fourier, 205–6. 24. Cohen, “Surrealism and the Art of Consumption,” 29–30. 25. Audoin, Surréalistes, 172; Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 182. 26. Joubert, Mouvement des surréalistes, 299–300. 27. Laubier, Condition of Women in France, 2, 4. 28. Ibid., 28. 29. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 90, 126, 102, 104. 30. Laubier, Condition of Women in France, 48–49. 31. Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 190–91. 32. Breton, “Surrealism Continues.” 33. “‘Femme selon l’optique surréaliste,’” 466, 467–70, 471. 34. See Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 176, 178. 35. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 522–23. 36. Rogow, preface to Arcanum 17, 19. 37. Breton, Arcanum 17, 61–62. 38. Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements, in Utopian Vision, 175.

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39. Ibid., in Utopian Vision, 176; Beecher, Charles Fourier, 207. 40. Fourier, Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, 141, translated and quoted in Spencer, Charles Fourier, 90. 41. Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference, 52–53; Francblin, “Feminisme utopique de Charles Fourier”; Spencer, Charles Fourier, 90–95. 42. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 232–34, 236. 43. Ibid., 236, 237. 44. Ibid., 112, 236. 45. Audoin, “Air de fête,” unpaginated. My translation. 46. Breton, Arcanum 17, 60. 47. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 615. 48. Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements, in Utopian Vision, 174. 49. Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference, 25–35, 65. 50. L’Écart absolu, unpaginated, translated and quoted in Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 630. 51. Ibid., 630–31. 52. José Pierre, “Changer la femme (7. Femme modern style),” in L’Écart absolu, unpaginated. My translation. 53. Ibid. Translation adapted from Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 630. 54. Ibid. My translation. 55. See Coffin, “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and MidCentury Sex,” 30. 56. Beecher, Charles Fourier, 297–98. 57. See Breton-Debout correspondence, 1958–66, BRT C Sup 231, Fonds André Breton, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris. 58. Charles Fourier, “Des sympathies puissancielles,” in Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, 27–31. 59. Simone Debout, “La plus belle des passions,” ibid., 19–26. 60. Raymond Borde, “Nous voulons un enfant (3. Roi de rats),” in L’Écart absolu, unpaginated. My translation. 61. Ibid.; Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 180–81.

Bibliography

Audoin, Philippe. Les surréalistes. 1973. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1995. ———. “Le talisman de Charles Fourier: Complément d’enquête.” La brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 8 (November 1965): 70–77.

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62. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 126. 63. Borde, “Nous voulons un enfant.” My translation. 64. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 456, 523. 65. Fourier, Nouveau monde amoureux, 235–36. My translation. 66. Beecher, Charles Fourier, 305. 67. Timm and Sanborn, Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe, 170–71. 68. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe, 96–102, 106–9, 134. 69. Legrand, “De l’histoire, de la volupté.” 70. Beecher, Charles Fourier, 3–4. 71. Debout, “Plus belle des passions,” 23. 72. See Fourier, Nouveau monde amoureux, 329–32. 73. Simone Debout, introduction to Fourier, “De l’orgie de musée ou omnigamie mixte en ordre composé et harmonique,” in L’Écart absolu, unpaginated. 74. Breton, “Introduction to the International Surrealist Exhibition (1959),” translated by Simon Watson-Taylor, revised by Donald Nicholson-Smith, in Pierre, Investigating Sex, 167, 169–71, 170; see Clark, Desire, 198, 208. 75. Beecher, Charles Fourier, 302–3. 76. Ibid., 311; Fourier, Nouveau monde amoureux, 312. My translation. 77. Fourier, Nouveau monde amoureux, 329, in Harmonian Man, 279. 78. Mahon, “Staging Desire,” 277. 79. Debout, introduction to Fourier, “De l’orgie de musée.” 80. See the June 18, 1968, issue of L’Archibras. 81. Quoted in Laubier, Condition of Women in France, 47–48. My translation. See Zegel, Idées de mai, 100. 82. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe, 148. 83. Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life, 17, 63, 191, 236–37, 249, 254. 84. Morel and Schérer, “Charles Fourier,” 148–59. 85. “Le retour de Charles Fourier,” Internationale situationniste, no. 12 (September 1969), reprinted in Morel and Schérer, “Charles Fourier,” 158.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1983. Beecher, Jonathan. “L’Archibras de Fourier, un manuscrit censuré.” La brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 7 (December 1964): 66–68.

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———. Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Breton, André. Arcanum 17: With Apertures Grafted to the End. Translated by Zack Rogow. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994. ———. “Interview with Jean Duché (Le littéraire, October 5, 1946).” In Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, translated by Mark Polizzotti, 196–208. New York: Paragon House, 1993. ———. Ode to Charles Fourier. Translated by Kenneth White. London: Cape Goliard Press in association with Grossman Publishers, 1970. ———. “Surrealism Continues.” In What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, edited by Franklin Rosemont, 311–12. New York: Monad Press, 1978. Clark, Anna. Desire: A History of European Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 2008. Coffin, Judith G. “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and MidCentury Sex.” French Politics, Culture, and Society 28, no. 2 (2010): 18–37. Cohen, Jennifer Rose. “Surrealism and the Art of Consumption.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2017. Dax, Adrien. “A propos d’un talisman de Charles Fourier: Analyse critique et essai de reconstitution.” La brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 4 (February 1963): 18–23. Durozoi, Gérard. History of the Surrealist Movement. Translated by Alison Anderson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. L’Écart absolu. Paris: L’Œil, 1965. Exhibition catalog. Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, 1959– 1960. Paris: Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1959. Exhibition catalog. “‘La femme selon l’optique surréaliste’ d’André Breton, Vincent Bounoure, Radovan Ivsic, Joyce Mansour, José Pierre: Un projet d’exposition avorté.” In La femme et le surréalisme, edited by Erika Billeter and José Pierre, 465–81. Lausanne: Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, 1987. Exhibition catalog. Flahutez, Fabrice. Nouveau monde et nouveau mythe—Mutations du surréalisme, de l’exil américain à l’ “Écart absolu” (1941–1965). Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2007. Fourier, Charles. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier. Edited by Mark Poster. Translated by Susan Hanson. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971. ———. Le nouveau monde amoureux. Vol. 7 of Œuvres complètes de Charles Fourier. Edited by Simone Debout-Oleszkiewicz. Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1967.

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———. Œuvres complètes de Charles Fourier. Edited by Simone Debout-Oleszkiewicz. 9 vols. Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1966–68. ———. The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Edited and translated by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Francblin, Catherine. “Le feminisme utopique de Charles Fourier.” Tel quel 62 (1972): 44–69. Grogan, Susan K. French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women and the New Society, 1803–44. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Herzog, Dagmar. Sexuality in Europe: A TwentiethCentury History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Joubert, Alain. Le mouvement des surréalistes, ou le fin mot de l’histoire: Mort d’un groupe— naissance d’un mythe. Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 2001. LaCoss, Donald. “Attacks of the Fantastic.” In Surrealism, Politics, and Culture, edited by Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss, 267–99. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003. Laubier, Claire, ed. The Condition of Women in France, 1945 to the Present: A Documentary Anthology. London: Routledge, 1990. Legrand, Gérard. “De l’histoire, de la volupté et de la mort: Sept projets de thèses en l’honneur de Sigmund Freud et de Norman O. Brown.” La brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 5 (October 1963): 7–17. Lehoucq, Emile. “Un divertissement linguistique de Fourier.” La brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 4 (February 1963): 24–25. Mahon, Alyce. “Staging Desire.” In Surrealism: Desire Unbound, edited by Jennifer Mundy, Vincent Gille, and Dawn Ades, 277–98. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Exhibition catalog. ———. Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Morel, Jean-Paul, and René Schérer. “Charles Fourier, de l’embaumé au déboulonné.” In Charles Fourier: L’écart absolu, edited by Emmanuel Guigon, 144–59. Dijon: Presses du Réel Editions and Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon, 2010. Exhibition catalog. Pierre, José, ed. Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research, 1928–1932. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso, 1992. Polizzotti, Mark. Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

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Richardson, Michael, and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, eds. and trans. Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations. London: Pluto Press, 2001. Rogow, Zack. Preface to Arcanum 17: With Apertures Grafted to the End, by André Breton, 17–21. Translated by Zack Rogow. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

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Spencer, M. C. Charles Fourier. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Timm, Annette F., and Joshua A. Sanborn. Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. 2nd rev. ed. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. London: Rebel Press; Seattle: Left Bank Books, 1994. Zegel, Sylvain. Les idées de mai. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.

Passionate Attraction

“To Be a Painter Means to Oppose”

Exhibiting and Politicizing Robert Rauschenberg, 1959–1965

Gavin Parkinson

5.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) is not usually thought to have had anything like a trajectory through surrealism. He was never close to the Paris Surrealist Group of the postwar period, even though he visited the French capital for an unrewarding period of study at the birthplace of the Nabis, the Académie Julian, between March and October 1948; nor did he have any contact with the surrealist group that began in Chicago in the mid-1960s.1 His innate artistic sympathy toward the art of Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp, and his attraction to the Dada “aesthetic” more generally, made him view André Breton and surrealism, not unreasonably, as the cause of Dada’s obscurity from the 1920s to the 1950s, avowing in a 1980s interview with the art critic Barbara Rose, “I don’t like Surrealism. I think Dada was totally misrepresented by people like Breton. The Surrealists tried to tuck people under their wing and use them because they needed visually interesting motifs.”2 This was already a long-standing aversion. At the height of his powers in the mid-1960s, Rauschenberg had flatly told Brian O’Doherty, “I hate Surrealism,” a remark passed on by the critic without elaboration.3

Yet Rauschenberg had a very favorable reception in surrealism in the 1960s, and his own attitude toward his work and its potential audiences make a surrealist Rauschenberg perfectly justifiable. In order to broach that history, it is necessary to look a bit more broadly than usual at art in France at the beginning of that decade, or, to put it another way, to adjust art history a little by taking surrealism seriously as a noteworthy participant in the midst of the emerging avant-gardes of the time, particularly neo-Dada, with which Rauschenberg was initially associated.

Setting a Stage for Scandal: EROS and Surrealist Intrusion The first significant use of the unloved term “neo-Dada” was made by Robert Rosenblum in the journal Arts in May 1957, figuring as an adjective rather than a proper noun in a

brief review of the exhibit New Work of May 6–25 at Leo Castelli’s gallery that discerned “a vital neo-Dada spirit” in Jasper Johns’s Flag (1954–55) by bridging it with “the reasonable illogicalities of a Duchamp Readymade” (Rosenblum did not apply the tag to Rauschenberg’s work, but the collage Gloria of 1956 impressed him equally as “alternately rough-edged and elegant, hilariously funny and grimly sordid”); the label surfaced for the second time in Art News in January 1958 to characterize Johns’s Target with Four Faces (1955).4 It had taken on quite a stable and uncontroversial meaning by 1960, even though the pejorative connotations were never far away, and its career would be brief as a coherent descriptor.5 Although the link between Duchamp and neo-Dada has been made many times since and is regarded by historians of twentieth-century art as crucial to the current understanding of art after modernism, the connection between surrealism and neo-Dada has been given barely any notice, probably because the two have seemed too distant from each other technically, iconographically, theoretically, thematically, and conceptually. However, this was not the way it was always seen, and certainly not in France. One recent study asserts that the rare uses of the term “neo-Dada” in that country were made with a “strong assimilation to surrealism” in the years up to about mid-1962, after which point the hypothetical affiliation with surrealism was eroded as the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris played down the European aspects of its artists, particularly after pop became identified as a “school” whose specifically “American” features were stark, novel, controversial, and marketable.6 In fact, there has always been glaring historical evidence for a potential closeness between surrealism and neo-Dada, available since surrealism’s eighth collective exhibition, the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS), which took place from December 15, 1959, to February 29, 1960, at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris. Organized by Breton and Duchamp with the assistance of the young surrealist José Pierre, EROS meant to explore eroticism in many of its forms, from sadomasochism to necrophilia and cannibalism. Breton acknowledged that the show was inspired partly by the publication of Georges Bataille’s Eroticism in 1957 (and was sandwiched between that and Bataille’s last book, The Tears of Eros of 1961).7 Including contributions from sixteen women, EROS articulated surrealism’s move toward an increasingly progressive awareness of gender, sex, and sexuality, while sticking to its unwavering mission to arrest the larger public’s attention, contest its values, and allow entry only to the “initiated.” Among the seventy-five surrealist artists, past and present, who were represented at EROS were Rauschenberg and Johns, who were allowing their work to be considered in a very specific, prehistoricized context. Alyce Mahon states that their inclusion was due to “Cordier’s links with New York,” which were indeed strong, particularly with the Leo Castelli Gallery.8 But it actually followed an initial enquiry by Breton to Duchamp 93

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about artists in New York who might be contacted, at the suggestion of Duchamp, who had visited the studios of both for the first time a few months earlier, in late January 1959—not with their mutual acquaintance John Cage, who became close to Duchamp a little later, but with the surrealist sympathizer Nicolas Calas, whom Duchamp had known since the late 1930s9—and finally by Pierre’s invitation to Rauschenberg and Johns to make what Pierre later called their “slightly accidental” appearance in the exhibition.10 Since Calas had referred directly to both Bed (1955) and Target with Plaster Casts (1955) in his essay “ContiNuance” early in 1959, he might well have acted alongside his friend Duchamp, also mentioned in the article, in recommending to Breton their loan to the surrealists and inclusion in EROS later that year.11 In a letter to the Leo Castelli Gallery, Pierre specifically requested “The Bed [sic] on the recommendation of Marcel Duchamp” for the show.12 Leo Castelli and Rauschenberg happily complied. On September 10, Castelli answered this and the letter sent directly to Johns on behalf of himself and the two artists, informing the surrealist “how delighted we were for them to be invited to participate,” adding that he would ship Bed directly from Kassel, where it had been dispatched to documenta 2; Target with Plaster Casts would accompany it to Paris because “we think that it probably is the piece that Marcel Duchamp had in mind when he invited Jasper Johns to participate in the show.”13 The two works had already caused some controversy, to the point of being censored. The previous year, Bed had been sent to an exhibition of young US and Italian artists held at Gian Carlo Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto from April to September 1958, but it was refused entry to the main gallery and remained in a storage room, owing to its lurid appearance, according to Calvin Tomkins.14 The whole story had been available to Duchamp in the New York Herald Tribune in June, where chief art critic Emily Genauer called Bed an “army cot,” quite plausibly given Rauschenberg’s stint in the US Navy in 1944–45.15 Genauer went on to quote the critic and curator Giovanni Urbani, who did a good job of figuring Rauschenberg as a perfect Dadaist while pompously attempting to justify the exclusion of his work through one of those remarks that confirm intolerance by trying to deny it: “I feel,” he said, “that our American collaborators have shown a lack of cultural responsibility. To hang such works as ‘art’ would be an insult to the serious creative artists in the show, to the festival, to Spoleto itself. They are beneath our dignity: I am as opposed to censorship as anyone. But there comes a point at which a responsible critic must draw the line, and be prepared to defend his position. It is not a style of art I am resisting. It is an attitude, destructive and nihilistic.” Mr. Menotti later told me he would back Urbani’s decision completely.16

Another palaver unfolded the following year in the months preceding EROS, this time at documenta 2, held from July 11 to October 1, where Bed was reproduced in the catalog Against the Liquidators

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and had been installed but was swiftly removed, in Hans Haacke’s eyewitness account, at the insistence of the art historian Werner Haftmann, who was the assistant to artistic director and documenta originator Arnold Bode.17 Mildly incongruously, Haftmann had written favorably of Dada and, as editor at the Cologne publisher DuMont, would commission Dada: Kunst und Antikunst (1964) from Hans Richter two years later, in which Rauschenberg featured as one of a handful of artists tolerated as worthy descendants in Richter’s final chapter, “Neo-Dada.”18 Not so at documenta 2, where Bed was stowed in event secretary Rudolf Zwirner’s office for the duration of the event, still lying or standing there at the time of the correspondence between Pierre and Castelli’s artists.19 Bed’s and Target with Plaster Casts’ evident talent to disturb—the latter underwent threats (or requests) of censorship at the hands of Alfred H. Barr Jr. and the Museum of Modern Art in 1958 (as originally told by Castelli) as well as the Jewish Museum in New York—must have been known to Duchamp when he suggested work by Rauschenberg and Johns for EROS in a period of increasing state censorship in France at the height of the Algerian War of Independence.20 There is no evidence that Rauschenberg voiced resistance to the loan in order to retain some distance from surrealism, and if he had, the advice of his dealer would have won him over anyway. Castelli was well aware of the instantly canonical significance of the surrealists’ event. He had attended not only the opening of Breton’s Galerie Gradiva in Paris in May 1937 but also the legendary International Exhibition of Surrealism at Georges Wildenstein’s Galérie Beaux-Arts the following year (with his then wife, the future Ileana Sonnabend).21 So it was that Bed was displayed for the first time in Europe at EROS, on the third attempt (fig. 5.1). The status of Bed and its setting in the spectacle did not disappoint. Hung close to the ground, it was shown with a cluster of paintings, sculptures, and objects by artists in or close to the surrealist group, such as Joan Miró, Yves Laloy, E. F. Granell, Clovis Trouille, Pierre Molinier, and others, densely grouped to relate the themes of sleep, dream, sex, and death up to the end of one of the dimly lit corridors that linked the rooms of the extravaganza. It was afforded a privileged position, uninterruptibly viewable all along that corridor (in principle at least), placed next to Alberto Giacometti’s Invisible Object (1934), presumably to suggest a physical relationship between the standing nude female figure and the standing bed, which are indeed proportionately matched to the extent that installation photographs give the peculiar illusion of Bed appearing to be about the size of an actual bed (so less like a picture and more like a bed again) beside the one-anda-half-meter-tall statue, a misapprehension enforced by the low ceiling in that quarter of the exhibition and perhaps some distortion in photographs. Man Ray’s cartoonlike Virgin (1955) was sited overhead nearby, suggesting, irreverently and comically, the Assumption as depicted in a Renaissance ceiling fresco. It extended metaphorically the 95

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Fig. 5.1  Henri Glaeser, interior of EROS exhibition (1959) showing Rauschenberg’s Bed and Alberto Giacometti’s Invisible Object. © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2020 / © Rauschenberg Foundation / VAGA at ARS, New York, and DACS, London, 2020.

formal interplay of horizontality and verticality, possibly conceived by Duchamp as an echo of the same displacement performed through Readymades such as Fountain (1917) and Trébuchet (1917), and insisted upon by the priority given the upended Bed, whose emphatic summoning of the horizontal register signifying “culture” into modern art would soon help spark a trailblazing theory of postmodernism in the visual arts in the writings of Leo Steinberg.22 Johns’s now almost equally well known Target with Plaster Casts could be seen at the end of the exhibition, its target meant to rhyme formally, again, with the circular breasts of Max Walter Svanberg’s Portrait of a Star III (1956–57). Both overlooked the notorious Cannibal Feast installation by Meret Oppenheim, which itself rhymed, poetically this time, with the metaphorical activity of “mutilation” suggested by Target with Plaster Casts, and conceptually with the despoiled Bed out in the corridor. Against the Liquidators

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Artists and critics living in New York who thought that surrealism, like Dada, was a historical movement that no longer existed had that misapprehension confirmed in 1960 by the English-language translation of Marcel Jean’s History of Surrealist Painting, which had come out in French the previous year. The book was well received by art historians and a larger public as the most comprehensive history of its subject to date. It was equally reviled by Breton and the surrealists, who now set about reminding their audience of the idiosyncrasies and currency of the movement through the exhibition Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, held at the D’Arcy Galleries on Madison Avenue from November 28, 1960, to January 14, 1961 (fig. 5.2). Staged at the very moment that pop art was breaking the surface of the New York art scene, Surrealist Intrusion was directed by Breton from afar in Paris and Duchamp on site, and managed in its day-to-day particulars by Pierre and Édouard Jaguer. Pre-pop works by tenacious Belgian surrealist loyalist E. L. T. Mesens and Öyvind Fahlström (about to become acknowledged as a fullfledged pop artist, admired by both Rauschenberg and Johns) were included in Surrealist Intrusion, foreshadowing the interleaving of objects of consumer culture with pictorial strategies of juxtaposition borrowed from surrealism that were soon to appear as the hallmark of James Rosenquist’s painting.23

Fig. 5.2  Installation at the D’Arcy Galleries exhibition Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain (1960). Photo courtesy of Collection David Fleiss, Galerie 1900–2000 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2020 / © Rauschenberg Foundation / VAGA at ARS, New York, and DACS, London, 2020.

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Also present in Surrealist Intrusion, in the final room next to work by Max Ernst and Wolfgang Paalen, who had both long been associated with surrealism, Rauschenberg’s Bed and Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts made a second visit to the surrealist fold. The first was idiosyncratically bound to the wall as usual, while the second assumed a squat bestial or anthropomorphic air, propped up on two blocks on the floor like a sculpture for the one and only time, as though it were supposed to join in the imaginary trade-off of floor and wall begun by the displaced Bed, though the decision was probably forced on the curators because the window in the small room denied it wall space, culminating in a kind of Jarryesque makeover of Johns’s assemblage by the surrealists. In addition to recently befriending Duchamp, Rauschenberg and Johns had just begun to collect his work. They would have been pleased, therefore, that the context for Bed and Target with Plaster Casts at Surrealist Intrusion was at least partly Duchampian again, since both were shown in a room that included the end of a green hose that wound through the whole of the gallery as a modern, Readymade parody of Ariadne’s thread and “a pair of firedogs with some wood slightly burnt without chimney,” as they were described in a letter to Breton from Duchamp, who was responsible for such installation features.24 Even without a full record of the French surrealists’ responses, we can be sure that their construal of Bed at EROS and Surrealist Intrusion was distinct from the now familiar if simplistic art-historical one that slots it into the niche created by the close confrontation between Duchamp’s Readymades and certain varieties of flicked, dripped, smeared, or splashed abstract expressionism, spelling out a Franco-US avant-garde lineage at most. Beds had already made an appearance in a surrealist manifestation when four were positioned right side up as seating and structural props in the layout of the 1938 group exhibition in Paris; their capacity for poetic augmentation is captured in Robert Benayoun’s entry for “bed” in the “Lexique succinct de l’érotisme” that featured in the EROS catalog, which was the third-longest (behind “breasts” and “perversion”).25 No doubt relieved to witness the return of the body to US art after abstraction, or at least the indexes and evidence of its passage, Pierre wrote at the time of EROS, “Rauschenberg’s Bed, in its firework display of pictorial pollution, seems destined by the very exorbitance of its appearance to excite the impulse of the spectator beyond associations of depressing ideas.”26 This is to say that unlike the narrower if connotative sex-crime-murder narrative of Bed that had already been put forward, the surrealists saw in the work an extended, dialectical Freudian metaphor of sex and death, birth, sleep, and illness, and also activity/passivity, laziness/work (given the importance of the bed as arguably the principal site of surrealist activities) and representation/“the real.”27 The upright bearing of Rauschenberg’s framed Bed and its location against the wall potentially superimposes, juxtaposes, or, better, “condenses” and “displaces” (because Freud’s language for his theory of dreams is unusually appropriate to this, the very object in which we dream) Against the Liquidators

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sleep, dreams, and perhaps sleepwalking, while layering them further onto the act of painting. Both Bed and Target with Plaster Casts were then owned by Castelli, who had briefly shown surrealist works in Paris just before the war, been friendly with some of the European surrealists in New York during it, and gave Rauschenberg and Johns their now legendary first monographic shows in his gallery early in 1958.28 The constructions were hung at the respective events; Bed was one of just two exhibits sold at Rauschenberg’s (to Castelli; the other was returned to the dealer), while Target with Plaster Casts appeared in the Johns showcase as one of only two or three works (scholars disagree on this) that failed to sell. The two shows were attended by the French critic Michel Ragon, who visited the studios of both artists and would be the first in France to use in print the terms “neo-Dada” and “pop art,” in May 1961 and February 1963, respectively.29 Following a four-year stay in the United States, Ragon reported extensively on contemporary art in that country to an international but mainly French public early in 1959, in an article in Cimaise dated “November 1958.”30 He predicted the success of both artists but was cautious on Johns—“We mustn’t cry ‘Fraud’ too quickly”—while being effusive on Rauschenberg, mainly because “one of his most original qualities is to ally a Dada spirit with a grand classical pictorial knowledge.”31 The surrealists would indeed cry “fraud” on Johns by 1963; as for Rauschenberg, Ragon’s interpretation might very well have constituted a dialectic neat enough to attract their attention, yet they would have rejected its two cultural points of reference.32 In the 1960s, they would seek a reading of Rauschenberg’s work that had no need for either but was formed by a coalition of surrealism’s long-established aesthetico-poetic position, recently adjusted to accommodate a new ethical dimension, and driven by contemporary political events.

Surrealism, Algeria, and Rauschenberg in 1961: Galerie Daniel Cordier After his early stay in Paris in 1948, Rauschenberg would not return until April 1961, departing for Europe with Johns for various events and initiating what would be several years of travel.33 These events included his first, unsuccessful (no sale) solo exhibition in France, held in the capital from April 27 till June 8, at the same Galerie Daniel Cordier where the surrealists’ EROS had taken place and where Rauschenberg’s work now became entangled with politics. That might have been anticipated to an extent because the period in which it found an audience in France was a particularly volatile one politically in that country, in a way that thoroughly impacted the surrealists. As early as December 9, 1954, only weeks after war had begun in Algeria on November 1, the surrealists had joined the Comité de Lutte contre la Représsion Coloniale.34 As Carole Reynaud Paligot has written, “The mobilization of the surrealists in favor of 99

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insurgent Algerians had been rapid, as opposed to other intellectuals,” some of whom began to stir from the middle of 1955.35 This early allegiance had been followed from 1954 to 1958 by their adherence to at least five committees formed on behalf of imprisoned Algerians and objectors to the war, and the surrealists had also contributed significantly to the Comité d’action des intellectuels contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord (which Breton had helped set up).36 The surrealists’ commitment to the Algerian cause was defended and expounded in their main review of the second half of the 1950s, Le surréalisme, même, where articles in 1956 and 1957 drew attention to Messali Hadj, the imprisoned leader of the Mouvement National Algérien.37 They would frequently demonstrate publicly and protest in print against the war in that decade and the next. Between the liberation and 1958, France had seen no fewer than twenty-eight different heads of government come and go. The first and last of these was Charles de Gaulle, who had reassumed leadership as prime minister, and then as president, on June 1, 1958, owing mainly to the catastrophe now clearly materializing in Algeria after the uprising in Algiers and the “Algiers putsch” of May 13 after nearly four years of war. De Gaulle was able to secure full powers to rule by decree for six months, a “rest period” for the National Assembly for four months and a mandate to submit a new constitution to the nation. With the end of the Fourth Republic and de Gaulle’s return to power, then, a period of instability seemed to the surrealists and their friends to be giving way to one of dictatorship. As the Communists in the Assembly cried “Le fascisme ne passera pas!,” the surrealists helped set up and contributed significantly to the review Le 14 Juillet, which protested de Gaulle’s powers.38 The main statement to which the surrealists committed themselves over Algeria was the “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War” or “Declaration of the 121” (1960). The document was immediately considered a major statement against colonialism and continues to be recognized in that way, condemning military fascism and asserting the legitimacy of resistance to colonialism in Algeria and aid given to Algerians from France, while defending conscientious objectors and desertion from the French army.39 It was drafted and edited by Maurice Blanchot, Dionys Mascolo, the surrealists, and their friends, and then signed by them and many others (though not, as Kristin Ross reminds us, the established and emerging stars of theory: no Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Philippe Sollers, and so on).40 The “Declaration of the 121” was made public on September 1, 1960, and had a powerful effect on both the leaders of the revolution in Algeria and on public opinion, altering the political climate in France and bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets in support of the supposed 121 throughout France (there were twice as many signatories by the time of the second distribution in October, in fact, made just prior to the opening of Surrealist Intrusion in New York).41 Against the Liquidators

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Plates

Color Plate 1  George Lois, cover of Esquire magazine, November 1968. Conceived and art directed by George Lois. Courtesy of George Lois.

Color Plate 2  Envelope from Franklin Rosemont to Herbert Marcuse, April 16, 1973. Herbert Marcuse Archive, Archivzentrum der Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main. With permission of the Literary Estate of Herbert Marcuse, Peter and Harold Marcuse, and his representative Peter-Ewin Jansen. © Marcuse Family.

Color Plate 3  Ted Joans reads his poetry at the Café Bizarre, New York City, 1959. Photo © Burt Glinn / Magnum Photos.

Color Plate 4  Ted Joans, The Real Black Power, 1967. Collage on wood. BANC MSS 99/244z, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. © Estate of Ted Joans, courtesy of Laura Corsiglia.

Color Plate 5  Cover of “Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution,” edited by Franklin Rosemont, special issue, Radical America 4 (January 1970). Reproduced with permission from the personal archives of Penelope Rosemont.

Color Plate 6  Cover of Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire, catalog of the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition, by Eugenio F. Granell. Reproduced with permission from the personal archives of Penelope Rosemont.

Color Plate 7  “Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices” (Fall 1979), an issue of Paul Buhle’s journal Cultural Correspondence, later reissued by City Lights. Reproduced with permission from the personal archives of Penelope Rosemont.

Color Plate 8  Le consommateur (The Consumer), installation view, L’Écart absolu, Galerie de l’Œil, Paris, 1965. Photo: Suzy Embo, courtesy of Fotomuseum, Antwerp.

Color Plate 9  Désordinateur (Dis-Computer), installation view, L’Écart absolu, Galerie de l’Œil, Paris, 1965. Photo: Suzy Embo, courtesy of Fotomuseum, Antwerp.

Color Plate 10  Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959. Oil, pencil, paper, metal, photography, fabric, wood, canvas, buttons, mirror, taxidermied eagle, cardboard, pillow. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the family of Ileana Sonnabend, 1782.2012 © 2020. Digital image: The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / VAGA at ARS, New York, and DACS, London, 2020.

Color Plate 11  Roberto Matta, Burn, Baby, Burn (L’escalade), 1965–66. Oil on canvas, 117 5/16 × 386 1/4 in. (298 × 981 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Gift of the 2009 Collectors Committee with additional funds provided by the Bernard and Edith Lewin Collection of Mexican Art Deaccession Fund (M.2009.42). © 2020. Digital image: Museum Associates / LACMA/Art Resource, New York / Scala, Florence.

Color Plate 12  Roberto Matta, Le vertige d’eros, 1944. Oil on canvas, 196 × 252 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Color Plate 13  The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, written by Michael O’Donoghue and illustrated by Frank Springer. Evergreen Review, June 1967. Courtesy of the Michael O’Donoghue Estate and Evergreen Review.

Color Plate 14  Cover of Oz, no. 28, the “School Kids” issue (May 1970).

Color Plate 15  Martin Sharp, Max the Birdman Ernst, Big O Posters, London, 1970. Poster on metallic foil, 29 × 19 cm. © Estate of Martin Sharp / DACS 2020.

Color Plate 16  Genesis P-Orridge, Venus Mount (or Venus Mound), 1976. Tate Collection, London. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and New Discretions.

Color Plate 17  Breyer P-Orridge, You Are My Other Half, 2003. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and New Discretions.

The surrealist writer and polemicist Robert Benayoun had made a particularly strong personal investment in the “Declaration of the 121.” Moroccan by birth, he had an acute historical awareness of the surrealists’ very public anticolonialism since their opposition to the Rif War in 1925, the year before he was born, and he was one of only four surrealists—the others were Breton, Gérard Legrand, and Jean Schuster—to append his signature in the first instance with the idea of deflecting the potential dismissal of the document as a specifically and typically surrealist protest.42 Many other surrealists, including José Pierre, signed when it was reprinted the following month, and all bore the professional and personal consequences. According to Benayoun’s testimony in a letter to Franklin Rosemont of February 1963, these included punishment from the state, persecution by the police, and death threats from the fascist paramilitary Organisation de l’Armée Secrète.43 In the short term, the main threat to the president and government came not from protestors and revolutionaries like the surrealists but from the French generals, who had initially welcomed de Gaulle back into office in 1958 as the leader who they believed would retain Algérie française and justify the loss of life suffered by the army. At the same time, they expected de Gaulle to protect the nation and army from the same disgrace that had followed surrender in World War II in 1940 and failure in Dien Bien Phu in 1954 at the conclusion of the Indochina War. This dissent on the part of army leadership led to the so-called Generals’ putsch of April 20, 1961. In the aftermath of the overwhelming vote in favor of de Gaulle’s referendum on self-determination held at the beginning of that year in France and Algeria, reflecting growing public protest against the war, Generals Challe, Jouhaud, Salan, and Zeller attempted to take control of Algiers. On April 23, with part of the army in revolt and the government in fear of a march on Paris, aging Sherman tanks rolled up to positions outside official buildings, including the Palais Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly, in a kind of ironically colonialist symbol of French subordinance due to France’s reliance on US militarism and benefaction since the war (Shermans were already obsolete in the United States). Air movement around Paris was halted, public transport stopped, and the cinemas closed. Parisians discussed the crisis in the cafés, which remained open, and watched, mesmerized, as de Gaulle addressed the nation on television, ordering civilians and the army to block the rebels by any means, while his prime minister, Michel Debré, warned of imminent rebel paratroopers about to descend from the skies.44 Nothing of the kind transpired in the end, because the attempted putsch was uncoordinated and lacked support.45 By April 27, the day of the opening of Rauschenberg’s first solo show in France at the Galerie Daniel Cordier, the drama was over, and the ringleaders of the simmering military insurrection were either under arrest or had taken flight. Rauschenberg was on the spot and recorded events pretty much as they had happened, 101

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in the transfer drawing Untitled (de Gaulle) (1961). It is a denser, more intricate, more complex composition than the ones that followed in that decade; disjointed, it tilts this way and that before running off in shards of printed text that form a loose clutch to the right, reflecting the air of claustration, chaos, and instability of the moment. Although Rauschenberg did not read French, he could see plainly enough across the media that the only story in town was the colonial war and its immediate repercussions, signaled just as patently in this drawing by the stamped “de gaulle” in the lower right quarter, the three reproductions of the president’s face, as though transmitted by a poor television signal, and four of “Alger/Algérie,” together with maps of Algeria, the image of a tank under de Gaulle’s name, and, at top center, the Palais Bourbon, threatened by clouds of watercolor and traversed by long, pencil-thin, closely set strokes that barely bring it to visibility. The headlines Rauschenberg traced convey the high stakes; the largest lettering is reserved for the word parachute at center left—like the situation, understandable with no French—its capital letters highlighted over white gouache in the right order but individually reversed, swinging like skydiving paratroopers above the impress of a car’s steering wheel nearby, a form that rhymes with the circular rim of an open canopy and might double as the target they aim to land on. The drawing could hardly have been more illustrative of the disruption caused by the affair and its commentary in the newspapers and on television, along with the mood of public anxiety. Naturally, that anxiety was shared by Cordier, his colleagues, and those in the media and art world who were supposed to report on Rauschenberg’s exhibition, with the result that its preparation was poor, the private view feebly attended, and the gallery not even open the following day.46 Remarkably, the exhibition accomplished something significant in spite of all this. It “stunned the Paris artists,” according to Tomkins, and was “an enormous success” in that sense,47 giving a first exciting glimpse of Rauschenberg’s work to Arman and Martial Raysse, both of whom starred in the concurrent breakout nouveau réalisme show Á Quarante Degrés au-Dessus de Dada in May.48 One week before that nouveau réaliste exhibition began, Rauschenberg’s renowned interview with André Parinaud, carried out on the suggestion of former surrealist and Rauschenberg advocate Alain Jouffroy, appeared in Arts, then edited by Parinaud, a few weeks into the run of Rauschenberg’s own show.49 Parinaud had shown himself to be a compliant and even ingratiating interlocutor for the duration of the radio interviews with Breton in 1952, but he intended to be less so with the young American artist.50 Acting as translator, Ileana Sonnabend later reported to Tomkins that Parinaud tried to turn Rauschenberg into a representation of what was “sick, materialistic, and degraded” in US society, but the artist’s candid and thoughtful answers were both vibrant and available to competing avant-garde factions, winning over not only Parinaud but also artists in Paris.51 For them, according to Sonnabend, “Rauschenberg became a hero” through his exhibition Against the Liquidators

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and interview: “He took them out of painting,” she added, “and into something else—life, maybe.”52 By this, Sonnabend meant that Rauschenberg’s art, composed of humble brica-brac and used, lost, or discarded materials, together with his unpretentious elucidation of its motivation, demonstrated to those impatient with the metaphysical intimations of eternity, transcendence, or the sublime that surrounded some of the writing on American abstract expressionism and nouveau réalisme that not only could significant art be distilled from the ordinary, close at hand, and even mundane, but that it could bear full justification from its maker. Sonnabend was not referring to surrealist artists, yet in the midst of warfare, political unrest, and social dissent in Paris, the surrealists and their friends would discover in this interview a different kind of ally in Rauschenberg. The following month, Pierre was one of only three critics who wrote on Rauschenberg’s Cordier show (alongside Ragon and Pierre Restany)—the national crisis that depleted attendance played its role—but Pierre’s allegiance to surrealism meant that it was a quite different version of the artist who emerged.53 In a wide-ranging roundup in Combat-Art of current art events in Paris that took a generally critical tone, Pierre compared what he called the “fake audacities in the service of the nouveaux riches” of the “Néo-Dadaistes” (meaning, in this case, the nouveaux réalistes and their contemporaries: Jean Tinguely, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and especially Yves Klein) with the work of Rauschenberg, where he saw “neither a cry of revolution nor a deliberate provocation but an act of presence and of existence.” The word “deliberate” was important because, according to Pierre, the apparently effortless reflection of life carried out by Rauschenberg’s work had not prevented Bed from being “one of the most provocative objects” at EROS.54 Pierre would return to this quality of the artist’s work at the end of the decade, referring to an “astonishing lightness” and “ease unknown even to the dadaists,” and he would soon extend his opinion of Rauschenberg’s artlessness—his achievement of unforced results comparable in their visionary aptitude to surrealism’s reputedly passive extraction of unconscious material through automatism—from provocation to politics.55 Pierre was scathing in Combat-Art about the “unfathomable foolishness” of Parinaud’s questions to Rauschenberg in the Arts interview the previous month, but he esteemed, as many others soon would, the oppositional role of the artist as Rauschenberg had set it out there in the widely celebrated remark “To be a painter [in the United States] means to oppose.”56 Accordingly, Pierre interpreted Pilgrim (1960), which had been reproduced with that interview and was also the principal work in the foldout brochure for the solo show at Daniel Cordier, as a statement against the contemplative, domesticating role of museum, boutique, and apartment.57 He understood these institutional and proprietorial contexts as exerting a lethal effect on works of art and as nothing less than the determining factors in the very creation of the art of Burri and the others, which Pierre construed in conflict with Rauschenberg’s artistic project. Whether Rauschenberg would have liked 103

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it or not, then (though it is hard to believe that the potential for such an interpretation would have escaped him), the chair in Pilgrim, attached to but facing away from the wall-mounted, nonfigurative painting bearing strokes of color that extend onto the chair, was read by Pierre as a metaphor of and corrective to the “gallery art” of both nouveau réalisme and abstract expressionism. The “message” the surrealist took from the work was a polemical one: the contemporary artist and viewer should turn their backs on such art and its collectors, dealers, and institutions, and be receptive to life. In this sense, Pierre believed that art could make moral statements about society and commerce that were comparable to those of sociology and philosophy, but they were, nevertheless, metaphorical, implicit within the structure of the artwork. Pierre obviously believed that this was what surrealist art had always sought to achieve. He implied as much by rounding out his overview of contemporary gallery events in Combat-Art in 1961, as though it were the natural conclusion to his reading of Rauschenberg’s work, with a plug for the current show of young surrealist painters then being held in the spaces of the Théâtre le Ranelagh. In that way, he linked the intention behind surrealist art to Rauschenberg’s work, as had been attempted at EROS and Surrealist Intrusion. The work had an ethical content, far from the “numbness” and “intellectual response that acknowledged pointlessness by making a subject out of it,” as Max Kozloff would read the influence of Rauschenberg and Johns on US art during the Cold War.58 From that point, an ethical and specifically political version of Rauschenberg gathered pace in surrealism, led by Pierre and Benayoun.

Between Politics and Poetry: The Art of Assemblage Later in 1961, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged its revisionist history of modern art show, The Art of Assemblage, from October 4 to November 12. Rauschenberg’s work was united with that of the nouveaux réalistes in an exhibition positing an alternative lineage for twentieth-century art to the modernist version (it was the year of the publication of Clement Greenberg’s selected writings, Art and Culture), privileging collage and construction from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (1897) through cubism, Dada and Marcel Duchamp, surrealism and neo-Dada, to early sixties assemblage and junk art. Rauschenberg’s work was perfectly at home at The Art of Assemblage since his favorites Schwitters and Duchamp were the most comprehensively represented artists there. Benayoun attended The Art of Assemblage; like Pierre, he was willing to seek common cause between surrealism and some contemporary art that was close to neo-Dada and pop. He might also have attended the public event that accompanied the exhibition, titled The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium, held at the museum on October 19, where Duchamp and Rauschenberg appeared on the panel of five contributors.59 Against the Liquidators

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Back in Paris, Benayoun set up a recorded discussion with Pierre in which the two signatories of the “Declaration of the 121” mulled over the merits of The Art of Assemblage. It was published in the periodical La brèche: Action surréaliste and saw the upstart nouveaux réalistes predictably trounced, while Rauschenberg figured as the most important contemporary artist. Benayoun would also have attended Rauschenberg’s show at the Galerie Daniel Cordier, so, like Pierre, he had become adequately acquainted with Rauschenberg’s Combines that year, which he surmised to be poetically anti-American, or, to be more accurate, as explicitly critical of the “American way of life” as metaphor and allusion can allow. This was a view that had not been fully articulated by Pierre in Combat-Art. Benayoun now argued that Rauschenberg stood apart from both the degradation entailed by the materials used by the nouveaux réalistes and from the literalism of pop and junk artists such as Jim Dine, John Chamberlain, and Richard Stankiewicz. The two surrealists saw all of those artists as emphatically concerned with modern manufacturing, labor, consumerism, and the machine, yet uncritical of them: “erect[ing] pathetic altars to the automobile industry, to plumbing, and to ironmongery.” Rauschenberg, on the other hand, was driven not so much by a mere wish to reflect the modern city and the creation and circulation of its goods than by an obligation to inquire into the meaning of social acts. Consequently, Benayoun and Pierre concluded, “a very strict spirit of investigation seems to guide his assemblages.”60 Where Pierre had analyzed Pilgrim in Combat-Art for its allusive refutation of the monetization of avant-garde art, Benayoun took the recent Canyon (1959), first displayed at Castelli’s gallery in 1960, as a means of establishing the elliptical Rauschenbergian comment on the modern United States. Bearing the words “labor” and “social,” this Combine was present in The Art of Assemblage on only its second showing and was reproduced in color in the exhibition catalog.61 The infamous stuffed bald eagle that is both carrying and perched on an open cardboard box fixed to the lower half of the Combine comes into irresistible juxtaposition with the “shabby” pillow—to use Benayoun’s word—fastened to a piece of wood that lies flat against the canvas and suspended from the lower edge of the panel, breaking the frame of the assemblage and insisting upon the presence of the wall (in both its museum installation and its accurate reproduction) against which the whole is attached (see color plate 10).62 Benayoun only hinted at an iconographic reading of Canyon, so I will draw it out briefly here against the background I have sketched so far, in order to recuperate the implied surrealist reading that the waters of history have washed over. Notwithstanding the potential for a mythic theme brought to Canyon by the bird in the mural, there is a good reason that the eagle and pillow are the two items that Benayoun latched on to in this complex tableau. To the poetico-political “surrealist sensibility” of the early sixties, they nod at once to the fantasy of a dead or dormant, preserved yet cheaply antiquated, 105

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proud though destitute United States, further emblematized by a postcard of the Statue of Liberty nearly obliterated by paint; meanwhile, the dialectic triggered by the stuffed bird and the pillow—of animal and human or culture and nature, verticality and horizontality, movement and rest, mobility and immobility, flight and dream—replete with numerous Freudian implications, as in Bed, would only have confirmed the value of the lyrical license of Rauschenberg’s art to the surrealists. The juxtaposition is intuited as a thing of beauty even before consideration of these factors, or even the one of the bird with feathers on the outside and the pillow with feathers on the inside, of these two main elements, both “stuffed,” of the implications for both of weight and gravity or of the formal rhyme that binds them above and below. Having already stated in print his opinion of Rauschenberg, Pierre was quick to show accord with Benayoun’s admiration in the surrealist context of La brèche. He spoke there of the poetic content of Rauschenberg’s Combines in a manner that contrasts with the two surrealists’ treatment of Arman’s Accumulations (“a veritable apotheosis of clutter”),63 as well as their comments on the purveyors of décollage: The originality of Rauschenberg is to present elements that sometimes turn up in the category of scrap while transcending the “assemblage” of scrap parts by a lyric dimension [dimension lyrique], making him the heir of those members of that recent American school who were known as the most dynamic and explosive. By means of that lyric dimension, Rauschenberg escapes most often the rut of refuse in which so many artists complacently get stuck—whether that is the specialists of the torn poster ([Raymond] Hains, [Jacques] Villeglé, [François] Dufrêne) or Burri and his canvases made of bags that have been sewn, shredded, burnt.64

In its meaning of emotional or imaginative excess, “lyric” as it is used here is meant to recall Breton’s allocation to surrealism of the mission to “systematize” a “lyric behavior” at the expense of ordinary causality in Mad Love (1937). Breton had confirmed in that book the relevance of such behavior to poetic analogy by seeking it in “the continuous and perfect coincidence of two series of facts considered—until further notice—as rigorously independent,”65 just as he had sought in the “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924) to replace “the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism,” with Pierre Reverdy’s 1918 formulation of the poetic image: The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.66

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Consistent with this, Breton extolled “the spontaneous, clairvoyant, insolent connection established under certain conditions between two things whose conjunction would not be permitted by common sense” in “Ascendant Sign” (1948), his important postwar reevaluation of poetics and analogy specifically. In its implicitly alchemical argument that the analogical image moves irreversibly from one reality to another, creating “a vital tension straining toward health, pleasure, tranquillity, thankfulness, respect for customs,” no text could be more appropriate to the effort by Benayoun and Pierre to perceive a transmutation of the emblematically Rauschenbergian base materials into art.67 In their discussion, Benayoun and Pierre were opposing the “lyrical,” understood and accepted as part of the DNA of surrealism, to the “literal,” in that term’s function of defining and limiting. In other words, surrealism has an allusive, connotative orientation as compared with the inert, denotative position that the surrealists saw as the prop for the work of nouveau réaliste artists in The Art of Assemblage, among them Hains and the others, to whose number they added Fontana, whom they thought of as equally unable to transcend his materials owing to a lack of poetic sense.68 So this aesthetico-poetic approach by which the surrealists evaluated Rauschenberg’s work already had an ethical element. It would be developed as the means by which they could disengage the US artist’s connotative practice from the “Americanized” consumerism of nouveau réalisme as well as junk art and pop art. Benayoun and Pierre approached this by adding to their analysis the other and related aspect of the political: Benayoun: In the case of Rauschenberg, the status of scrap is exceeded by the fact that his painting harbours an element of subversion. In his titles, the elements of his composition, one perceives a cry of protest, a social and undoubtedly political demand that explains the embarrassment of certain art critics when they confront them. Pierre: Others seek to discover an order, aesthetic and uniquely aesthetic, in base, abject things. Rauschenberg aims much higher.69

The political, anti-imperialist Rauschenberg hypothesized by the surrealists was a persistent feature of their discussion of his work and rescued it from the contamination they thought it sometimes received from both nouveau réalisme and pop art in France. It is a version of the artist that gains some credence from remarks made a few years later by Rauschenberg himself against directly targeted political or social art: “When you just illustrate your feeling about something self-consciously—that is for me almost a commercial attitude.” He added, however, “If you feel strongly, it’s going to show. That’s the only way the political scene can come into my work—and I believe it’s there.”70

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Rauschenberg Revisited: Galerie Ileana Sonnabend and L’Écart absolu As noted, in spite of the high political stakes that nearly sabotaged it, Rauschenberg’s solo outing at the Galerie Daniel Cordier had been a local success with some artists in Paris and a handful of interested critics. But he achieved his real breakthrough in France with the sequential two-part “past and present” event at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, held February 1–16 and February 20–March 9, 1963; the first part was retrospective, displaying work from 1954 to 1961, the second, recent work from 1962 and 1963. Only about twelve or so Combines in total had been seen in France between 1959 and 1961; twelve more could be appraised at Sonnabend’s gallery in 1963, followed by fourteen silkscreen paintings in the second, “contemporary” show, where the aim was to present Rauschenberg comprehensively as apart from but recognizably succeeding abstract expressionism and departing further along his own self-created path in the new work.71 It was a turning point for Pierre, who would identify a malfunction in Rauschenberg’s powers precisely at the 1961–62 juncture that separated the first show from the second chronologically. Pierre perceived in Rauschenberg’s adoption of the silkscreen technique a dwindling of the artist’s poetic intuition, for which he blamed John Cage, which might help explain why he did not review the exhibition.72 However, the surrealists’ curatorial contemplation of the significance of Rauschenberg’s work would extend implicitly to L’Écart absolu (1965), the last exhibition of surrealism that Breton curated. It took place under the sign of Charles Fourier’s utopian philosophy and was unusual for a surrealist group show in its focus on a sustained polemicism, insisting on surrealism’s “absolute deviation” from all manifestations of consumer capitalism and its critique of technology and the unnuanced fixation on “progress.” It has been noted that “Marcuse’s all-out assault on the ideology of the ‘consumer society’ in his One-Dimensional Man [1964] provided part of the theoretical background” of the show, and Marcuse had declared his sympathy with Fourier’s thought in Eros and Civilization in 1955.73 Ninety-three exhibits were crammed into the small space of the Galerie de l’Œil for the duration of the show through December, many from Breton’s own collection, and several more had been made specifically for the theme of the exhibit.74 The surrealists’ enduring fascination with Bed could be found in the form of the fabricated anthropomorphic mattress, Le consommateur, or The Consumer (1965). Apparently a collectively assembled work conceived especially for L’Écart absolu by the painter and poet Jean-Claude Silbermann, now lost, The Consumer dominated the exhibition and was remembered as a Jarryesque concoction by one of the surrealists: “The character, the central totem of the exhibition was The Consumer, a kind of scarecrow close to four metres in height, with arms outstretched, made of a monstrous pink mattress, fully lined, hemmed and padded. A warning siren took the place of a head. His strumpot housed the porthole of a washing machine, which spun newspapers at intervals. A Frigidaire opened Against the Liquidators

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in his back from which a bridal veil issued. Silbermann, who had designed and built it, had given him a voice: his speech consisted of the prattling calls of taxi radios.”75 Kept upright by dehumanizing modern conveniences deemed essential, such as the television that formed the giant’s single eye, a washing machine as belly and fridge as heart, The Consumer mocked the bourgeois dream of the perfect home through its absurd decontextualization of what had become the basic appliances of domesticity in the 1960s—“goods whose habitual use effectively removed them from the discursive realm,” in the words of Kristin Ross.76 Its crucifix format, complete with halo of loudspeakers, seems to look back at and synthesize, in a more explicitly irreverent statement about modern consumerism and its worship, Rauschenberg’s standing Bed and Giacometti’s “praying” figure The Invisible Object as they had appeared together, overlooked by Man Ray’s ascending virgin at EROS in 1959–60, while replaying the anthropomorphic, Ubuesque mien of Target with Plaster Casts at Surrealist Intrusion. If there were still any doubt about the long-lasting heady effect produced on the surrealists by that essential Rauschenberg work at the earlier event, it is dispelled by Pierre’s remarks at the end of the decade in his major article on Rauschenberg in the magazine L’Œil: “I remember the emotion of my friends when, at the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme held at Daniel Cordier in 1959, Rauschenberg sent Bed on the advice of Duchamp.”77 In fact, the spirit of Duchamp himself was present in The Consumer, too, in the car license plate attached to the giant mattress, reading “HT 110QT,” meant at once to pun on the French acheter, to refer to the credit boom on automobile sales (the number of cars in the Paris region had doubled to two million since EROS), and to the author of L.H.O.O.Q. (1919).78

Conclusion The strange, temporary equivalence between old and new in EROS and Surrealist Intrusion—between surrealism and neo-Dada—when the historical lineage of the work of Rauschenberg and Johns was still untheorized, looks a lot stranger to us now than it did to its audience then. It shows surrealism attempting to cope with a forty-year history in a moment of intense political unrest, and in the middle of a period in which, as Ross notes, “new” was the operative term in French society and culture—nouveau roman, nouvelle vague, nouveau réalisme, nouvelle figuration—and neo-Dada was encroaching on France and Europe.79 Rauschenberg and Duchamp were never more than admired from afar by surrealists, and both had shown themselves hostile to surrealism to a greater or lesser extent. Yet the apparition of The Consumer at L’Écart absolu shows further that the Combine and the Readymade could nevertheless be made to conspire at the very fulcrum of surrealist poetics and polemics, in the movement’s exhibition space as much as in its criticism. 109

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Although the narrative of Rauschenberg’s French reception is becoming better known to art historians working on the 1950s and 1960s, conveniently demonstrating the task of historical, cultural, and even national bridge building that the artist’s work could achieve, the picture was not so cleanly cut to audiences at the time, which could therefore accept neo-Dada on surrealist ground. The rediscovery of Dada by art history and contemporary artists in the 1950s, alongside the growing collegiality between Duchamp and Rauschenberg and Johns from 1959, is now part of the narrative of twentieth-century art and is much better known than the ever-rising tide of praise for Duchamp in Parisian surrealist reviews in the fifties. The bias of historians toward the resurgence of Dada in neo-Dada can be explained partly by the sequential, generational model of critical (art) history in which paradigm exhaustion leads to new directions for art and, in this case, disinterest displayed by historians in the continuation of surrealism in the postwar period. More to the point, that lack of interest is really a suppression, because the prolonged existence of surrealism and Duchamp’s closeness to the movement enacts an inconvenient counternarrative. When both histories—of the revival of interest in historical Dada and the continuation of surrealism into the 1960s, reinvigorated by its political engagement—are entertained, the strategic location of recent neo-Dada work in surrealist exhibitions and admiration for Rauschenberg are not as surprising as they first seem.

Notes

1. Kotz, Rauschenberg: Art and Life, 60. 2. Rose, Rauschenberg, 64. 3. O’Doherty, Object and Idea, 116. 4. Rosenblum, “Castelli Group”; Hapgood, “Neo-Dada,” in Hapgood, Neo-Dada, 58n1. 5. For “Neo-Dada” as a “putdown,” see Craft, Audience of Artists, 11, 235n44. 6. Bigel, “Pop art à Paris,” 51, 76, 84, 90, 194. 7. André Breton, “Avis: Aux exposants, aux visiteurs,” in Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, 5–8. 8. Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 154; Tarenne, “Histoire de la galerie,” 506–9; Pacquement, “Rôle des galleries.” 9. Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, 411; Varnedoe, Jasper Johns, 164. 10. Pierre, André Breton et la peinture, 311n177. “Nous désirerions une œuvre de caractère érotique (c’est Marcel Duchamp qui nous a conseillé de vous inviter . . .).” José Pierre, undated letter on Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme paper to Jasper Johns via Leo Castelli, correspondence with Galerie Daniel Cordier, Leo Castelli Gallery

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records, box 10, folder 40, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 11. Calas, “ContiNuance.” 12. José Pierre, undated letter on Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme paper to Robert Rauschenberg via Leo Castelli, correspondence with Galerie Daniel Cordier, Leo Castelli Gallery records, box 10, folder 40, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 13. Leo Castelli to José Pierre, September 10, 1959, ibid. 14. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 137. 15. Genauer, “Wrong US Art,” 14. 16. Ibid., 14–15. 17. Haacke, “Lessons Learned,” unpaginated. 18. See Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, vi–xi, 81–82, 215–22. 19. Haacke, “Lessons Learned,” unpaginated. 20. Recorded in Tomkins, Off the Wall, 143–44; Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns, 49; Butt, Between You and Me, 136–37, 144–45; Varnedoe, Jasper Johns, 128. One reviewer interpreted the sign outside EROS—“Children under sixteen years of age not admitted”—as perhaps a means of fending off the 110

attention of the police or a deliberate provocation, adding, “A wave of sexual censorship under the pressure of ecclesiastical groups constitutes one of the more depressing of the secondary aspects of the Gaullist regime.” Michelson, “But Eros Sulks,” 32n2. 21. Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle, 130. 22. Steinberg, “Other Criteria.” 23. See the brief appreciation by Rauschenberg, “Öyvind Fahlström.” 24. Duchamp, Affectt Marcel, 371; Lewis Kachur, “Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain,: 151. 25. R. B. [Robert Benayoun], “Lit,” in Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, 131. 26. Pierre, “Surréalisme dans la grotte d’amour,” 60. 27. The first published observation of its violent connotations seems to have been made in an unsigned minor review subheaded “The Man Who Painted His Bed.” Newsweek, “Trend to the ‘Anti-Art.’” 28. Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle, 134–36, 144–51. 29. Bigel, “Pop art à Paris,” 35, 74. Hapgood mistakenly has as their first use the Art International review essay by Choay, “Dada, Néo-Dada, et Rauschenberg”; see Hapgood, “Neo-Dada,” in Hapgood, Neo-Dada, 58n1. 30. Ragon, “Art actuel aux Etats-Unis.” For the four-year stay, see the positive review of Rauschenberg’s first solo show in France at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Ragon, “Avant-garde.” 31. Ragon, “Art actuel aux Etats-Unis,” 28, 29. 32. See Tarnaud, “Correspondance.” 33. Ikegami, Great Migrator, 1. 34. See Horne, Savage War of Peace, 98. 35. Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes, 268. 36. See Mascolo, “Pour saluer André Breton.” 37. See Breton, “Parlant au meeting”; Massot, “Prisonnier de la mer.” 38. Horne, Savage War of Peace, 298; Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes, 265, 276. 39. “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War” (1960), in Richardson and Fijalkowski, Surrealism Against the Current, 194–97. 40. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 162. For the context and drafting of the “Declaration of the 121” and its repercussions for the signatories, see Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 391–402; Pierre, Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 2, 205–8, 390–96; Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes, 262–63. 41. Horne, Savage War of Peace, 416. 42. Pierre, Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 2, 392.

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43. See Robert Benayoun, “Letter to Chicago” (1963), in Rosemont and Kelley, Black, Brown, and Beige, 170. 44. Horne, Savage War of Peace, 455–56. 45. For a fuller account of events than I can give here, see Abramovici, Putsch des généraux. 46. Horne, Savage War of Peace, 456; Ikegami, Great Migrator, 29–31. 47. Tomkins, Bride and the Bachelors, 226, 227. 48. See the account by Ileana Sonnabend, quoted in Ikegami, Great Migrator, 31. 49. Parinaud, “‘Misfit’ de la peinture”; Ameline, “Comment les Combines de Rauschenberg,” 294. 50. Breton, Entretiens, 1913–1952. 51. Tomkins, Bride and the Bachelors, 227. 52. Sonnabend quoted in ibid. 53. Ameline “Comment les Combines de Rauschenberg,” 294. 54. Pierre, “Ou va l’art abstrait,” 2. 55. Pierre, “‘Cas’ Rauschenberg,” 45. 56. Pierre, “Ou va l’art abstrait,” 2; Rauschenberg quoted in Parinaud, “‘Misfit’ de la peinture.” 57. Pierre, “Ou va l’art abstrait,” 2. 58. Kozloff, “American Painting,” 52. 59. See Ruzicka, “Transcript of the Symposium,” 124–55. 60. Benayoun and Pierre, “Alchimie de l’objet” (quotations on 53). 61. Dickerman, Rauschenberg, 38. 62. Benayoun and Pierre, “Alchimie de l’objet,” 53. For an inaccurate reproduction of Canyon, with the pillow cropped, look no further than Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 385 (it is reproduced accurately on the corresponding page of the original French version of the book). 63. Benayoun and Pierre, “Alchimie de l’objet,” 52–53. 64. Ibid., 52. 65. Breton, Mad Love, 53. 66. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 20. Italics in the original. 67. Breton, “Ascendant Sign,” in Free Rein, 104, 107. 68. See Parkinson, Futures of Surrealism, 159–67. 69. Benayoun and Pierre, “Alchimie de l’objet,” 53. 70. Seckler, “Artist Speaks,” 84. 71. Bigel, “Pop art à Paris,” 61. 72. Parinaud et al., “Surréalisme aujourd’hui,” 13. 73. Rosemont, “Herbert Marcuse and the Surrealist Revolution,” 33. “The transformation of labor into pleasure is the central idea in Fourier’s giant socialist utopia.” Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation, 173. 74. Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 180. 75. Audoin, Surréalistes, 172. 76. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 29.

“To Be a Painter Means to Oppose”

77. Pierre, “‘Cas’ Rauschenberg,” 48. 78. Joubert, Mouvement des surréalistes, 300; Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 53.

Bibliography

Abramovici, Pierre. Le putsch des généraux: De Gaulle contre l’armée, 1958–1961. Paris: Fayard, 2011. Ameline, Jean-Paul. “Comment les Combines de Rauschenberg ont conquis l’Europe: Essai d’histoire culturelle (1958–1964).” In Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 287–306. Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, 2006. Exhibition catalog. Audoin, Philippe. Les surréalistes. 1973. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1995. Benayoun, Robert, and José Pierre. “Alchimie de l’objet, cabotinage du déchet.” La brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 2 (May 1962): 49–54. Bident, Christophe. Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible: Essai biographique. Seyssel: Éditions Champ Vallon, 1998. Bigel, Clémence. “Le pop art à Paris: Une histoire de la réception critique des avant-gardes américaines entre 1959 et 1978.” Vol. 1. Master’s thesis, Université Paris 1 PanthéonSorbonne, 2013. Breton, André. Entretiens, 1913–1952. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. ———. Free Rein. 1953. Translated by Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. ———. Mad Love. 1937. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ———. “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).” In Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 1–48. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. ———. “Parlant au meeting ‘Pour la défense de la liberté.’” Le surréalisme, même, no. 1 (October 1956): 4–5. ———. Surrealism and Painting. 1965. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Butt, Gavin. Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Calas, Nicolas. “ContiNuance.” Art News 57, no. 10 (1959): 36–39. Choay, Françoise. “Dada, Néo-Dada, et Rauschenberg.” Art International 5, no. 8 (1961): 82–84, 88. Cohen-Solal, Annie. Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli. New York: Knopf, 2010. Against the Liquidators

79. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 157.

Craft, Catherine. An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Dickerman, Leah. Rauschenberg: Canyon. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013. Exhibition catalog. Duchamp, Marcel. Affectt Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp. Edited by Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk. Translated by Jill Taylor. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, 1959– 1960. Paris: Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1959. Exhibition catalog. Genauer, Emily. “Wrong US Art Has Spoleto in a Dither.” New York Herald Tribune, June 15, 1958. Haacke, Hans. “Lessons Learned.” Tate Papers, no. 12 (Autumn 2009). https://​www​.tate​.org​ .uk​/research​/publications​/tate​-papers​/12 ​/lessons​-learned. Hapgood, Susan, ed. Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–62. New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1994. Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962. 1977. New York: NYRB, 2006. Ikegami, Hiroko. The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Joubert, Alain. Le mouvement des surréalistes, ou le fin mot de l’histoire: Mort d’un groupe— naissance d’un mythe. Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 2001. Kachur, Lewis. “Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain: Duchamp’s Exhibition Identity.” In AKA Marcel Duchamp: Meditations on the Identities of an Artist, edited by Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus, 142–59. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2014. Kotz, Mary Lynn. Rauschenberg: Art and Life. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. Kozloff, Max. “American Painting During the Cold War.” Artforum, May 1973, 43–54. Mahon, Alyce. Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005.

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Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilisation. 1955. Bungay: Sphere Books, 1969. Mascolo, Dionys. “Pour saluer André Breton.” In À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée: Entêtements, 217–20. Paris: Fourbis, 1993. Massot, Pierre de. “Le prisonnier de la mer.” Le surréalisme, même, no. 2 (Spring 1957): 159–62. Michelson, Annette. “But Eros Sulks: Surrealism’s Recent International Exhibition in Paris.” Arts 34, no. 6 (1960): 32–39. Newsweek. “Trend to the ‘Anti-Art.’” March 31, 1958, 94. O’Doherty, Brian. Object and Idea: An Art Critic’s Journal, 1961–1967. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Orton, Fred. Figuring Jasper Johns. London: Reaktion Books, 1994. Pacquement, Alfred. “Leo Castelli, Daniel Cordier, Ileana Sonnabend: Le rôle des galleries.” In Paris–New York: 1908–1968, 172–79. Paris: Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, 1977. Exhibition catalog. Paligot, Carole Reynaud. Parcours politique des surréalistes, 1919–1969. Paris: CNRS, 2010. Parinaud, André. “Un ‘misfit’ de la peinture newyorkaise se confesse.” Arts, no. 821 (May 10–16, 1961): 18. Parinaud, André, and Jean-Jacques Lévèque, with José Pierre, Jean-Claude Silbermann, and Hervé Télémaque. “Le surréalisme aujourd’hui.” La galerie des arts, no. 66 (March 1969): 11–13. Parkinson, Gavin. Futures of Surrealism: Myth, Science Fiction, and Fantastic Art in France, 1936–1969. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Pierre, José. André Breton et la peinture. Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1987. ———. “Le ‘cas’ Rauschenberg.” L’Œil, April 1969, 42–50. ———. “Ou va l’art abstrait?” Combat-Art, no. 79 (June 5, 1961): 2. ———. “Le surréalisme dans la grotte d’amour.” Art International 4, no. 1 (1960): 57–61. ———, ed. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 2, 1939–1969. Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1982. Ragon, Michel. “L’art actuel aux Etats-Unis / Art Today in the United States.” Cimaise, ser. 6, no. 3 (January–March 1959): 6–35. ———. “L’avant-garde.” Arts, no. 821 (May 10–16, 1961): 7.

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Rauschenberg, Robert. “Öyvind Fahlström.” 1961. Art and Literature, no. 3 (Autumn–Winter 1964): 219. Richardson, Michael, and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, eds. and trans. Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations. London: Pluto Press, 2001. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. 1965. London: Thames and Hudson, 2016. Rose, Barbara. Rauschenberg. New York: Vintage, 1987. Rosemont, Franklin. “Herbert Marcuse and the Surrealist Revolution.” Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, no. 4 (1989): 31–38. Rosemont, Franklin, and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds. Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Rosenblum, Robert. “Castelli Group.” Arts 31, no. 8 (1957): 53. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Ruzicka, Joseph. “Transcript of the Symposium.” In Essays on Assemblage, edited by John Elderfield, 124–50. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992. Seckler, Dorothy Gees. “The Artist Speaks: Robert Rauschenberg.” Art in America 54, no. 3 (1966): 73–84. Steinberg, Leo. “Other Criteria.” In Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, 55–91. London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Tarenne, Viviane. “Histoire de la galerie.” In Donations Daniel Cordier: Le regard d’un amateur, 461–523. Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1989. Exhibition catalog. Tarnaud, Claude. “Correspondance: D’une lettre de Claude Tarnaud à Robert Benayoun.” La brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 5 (October 1963): 68. Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde. 1965. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. ———. Duchamp: A Biography. London: Pimlico, 1998. ———. Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980. Varnedoe, Kirk. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996. Exhibition catalog.

“To Be a Painter Means to Oppose”

A Consciousness of Being

Burn, Baby, Burn and the Political Art of Roberto Matta

Alyce Mahon

6.

When painting a canvas, I paint all around me; I have tried to act as if I were situated at the center of the cube and the painting, instead of finding a window in front of me. . . . At that point the viewer is no more a viewer, but instead a “be-er,” while he gathers a consciousness of being.

—Roberto Matta, 1965

The oil painting Burn, Baby, Burn (L’escalade) of 1965–66, by the Chilean surrealist Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (1911–2002), documents a critical moment in American race politics—namely, the Black liberation movement and the Watts riots of 1965. Matta, who once described his homeland of Chile as “a small child [niñito chico] from the end of the Americas,” portrays an American landscape of brutality and fear in an epic work measuring almost three by ten meters (298 × 981 cm) (see color plate 11).1 In the composition, we find

details that resemble aspects of the images of the Watts riots that were widely disseminated in newspaper photographs and on television news: fragments of bodies, buildings, helicopters, vehicles, and a color palette dominated by flaming orange hues to the left and fluorescent green to the right—a palette, Matta once explained, that was intended to “spark energy.”2 While there is no identifiable geographical location in the painting, details make it clear that this is a battlefield of some kind. Whether what we are seeing is urban insurrection or guerrilla warfare is not clear. However, to the left we see a prone figure and what seem to be satellites surrounded by orange flames; in the middle ground, contorted and elastic figures seem to be fused with mechanical parts. To the right we see a row, or what might be termed a phalanx, of black helmeted heads behind shields, and further to the right edge, a looser cluster of crouching figures in phosphorescent green. Across the top of the canvas extends a long black object that might be the barrel of a gun

or some kind of aircraft with a jet stream in its wake. A powerful, disturbing work that effectively encircles the spectator, Burn, Baby, Burn exemplifies Matta’s declaration in 1965 that he aimed to instill a “consciousness of being” in the spectator.3

Burn, Baby, Burn Some of the imagery in the painting might allude to the Vietnam War (1964–75), which had begun in August 1964 for the United States and had grown rapidly in scale and intensity in 1965 and 1966. The war was a major source of outrage in the eyes of international avant-garde artists and intellectuals, including Matta. However, Matta took the title of the work from a common catchphrase of the race riots in the United States that would quickly become one of the most famous slogans of the sixties. The riots were triggered by the shooting in Manhattan of a fifteen-year-old Black boy, James Powell, on July 16, 1964, by an off-duty white police lieutenant. The incident escalated from “an altercation between some kids on break and the janitor” at the boys’ school to “a pitched battle—between hundreds of other students who saw the dead boy and the seventy-five police reinforcements who had been called in to quell the riot.”4 It then “sparked” other riots across the city, as Fred C. Shapiro and James W. Sullivan explain in their 1964 book Race Riots: The spark fell into Harlem and, with fire tending, intentional or unintentional, flamed into the Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant [Brooklyn] riots of 1964. . . . For six nights, mobs roamed the streets of the two boroughs. As many as 4,000 New Yorkers dedicated themselves to attacks on the police, vandalism, and looting of stores. When it was all over, police counted 1 rioter dead, 118 injured and 465 men and women arrested. . . . [The 1964 New York riots] can be said to have caused the riots that plagued other cities in succeeding weeks, because those riots were patterned on the ones touched off in New York.5

Anger mounted in Harlem, peaking on Saturday, July 18, a particularly hot day, when further riots resulted in another death, numerous injuries to police officers and civilians, looting, and arrests.6 Disturbances continued for several more days, leading to the deployment of mounted police and the threat of Molotov cocktails thrown from rooftops. What was perceived as a police occupation quickly gave rise to widespread community resistance in which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, and local Democrats played leading roles. In this context, the African American Communist activist Bill Epton (1932–2002) emerged as a noted figure in the riots. Epton was a founding member of the Progressive Labor Movement (later the Progressive Labor Party), and in 1964 he was the 115

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vice chairman of the party and the head of its Harlem branch. He also became the first person convicted of “criminal anarchy” in New York State since the “Red Scare” of 1919. Epton was charged on three counts: that he and the Progressive Labor Party put out a pamphlet describing how to make Molotov cocktails, that he led the “riot,” and that he was actively involved in arming Harlem residents. He was charged with advocating the killing of police officers and with fueling the riots with the incendiary cry “Burn, Baby, Burn!” The phrase was also ascribed to the Watts riots of 1965 and to the Black R&B disc jockey Nathaniel “Magnificent” Montague (1928–), who would cry “Burn!” over the airwaves and who went on to title his 2003 autobiography Burn, Baby! Burn! Montague opens his memoir by noting how his catchphrase became a political rallying cry: Come back with me to Watts, California, in August 1965: the Watts riots. I’m in bed early. I have to wake up to do my morning soul-music radio show on KGFJ, 1230 on the am dial. Got to keep burning the way I’ve been burning since I hit L.A. in February and took over the Negro neighborhoods. I’m falling asleep in my home in Brentwood, fifteen miles and a universe away from the madness, when all of a sudden I hear that chant on the TV news. “Burn, baby! BURN!” Wait a minute. That’s mine! The rioters are screaming it? . . . The next day I see TV pictures of the destruction that will eventually take three dozen lives and turn Watts into a moonscape forever captioned with my signature. I didn’t know it yet, but “Burn, baby! Burn!” is going to become institutionalized as a radical chant and a political rant. . . . Hell, I wanted a riot! But I wanted a riot on the airwaves. I wanted my listeners’ hearts to burn, not their homes.7

As Mike Davis and Jon Wiener have documented, Watts was home to some eighty thousand of the poorest people in Los Angeles, and in 1964 it had “the greatest concentration of debilitating health problems, the most congested public housing, and police-community relations beyond the breaking point.” Occurring over the course of six days, August 11–16, 1965, the Watts riots began when a California Highway Patrol officer stopped two Black men, Marquette and Ronald Frye, just outside the Los Angeles city limits for drunk driving. A confrontation ensued as a crowd gathered and police reinforcements arrived (twenty-six police cars and motorcycles), leading to the beating and arrest of the brothers and of their mother, Rena, who had arrived on the scene and tried to intervene. The crowd threw stones and bottles at the police cars, and someone was reported to have said, “Burn, baby! Burn.”8 The violence escalated, and soon Watts became a combat zone between Black nationalists and community dwellers and some sixteen thousand police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department, the California Highway Patrol, and the National Guard. Extending beyond the Watts neighborhood to a forty-six-square-mile area, thirty-four people died. There were 1,032 injuries and 3,438 arrests, and property damage was Against the Liquidators

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estimated at $200 million. By the time the curfew was lifted on August 17, the name Watts had become “a universal talisman of Black power and pride.”9 Press reports and camera footage of burning buildings dominated the media, witnesses cited the use of the phrase “Let’s burn. . . . baby, burn,” and angry white Angelenos bombarded the Los Angeles Police Department with demands that Magnificent Montague be stopped from using his “Burn, Baby, Burn” catchphrase.10 While Montague claimed it for R&B music, he continued to use the phrase on his radio show as the riots raged.11

The Forecast Is Hot! In selecting this catchphrase for the title of his mural-sized painting, Matta offered a surrealist homage to an uprising that began in Harlem and Watts and was followed by others in Newark, Detroit, Baltimore, and other cities in 1964–65, prompting the most profound domestic crisis in American history since the Civil War. In 1966, the Chicago surrealists issued a manifesto titled “The Forecast Is Hot,” in which they called for “the marvellous red and black validity of absolute revolt, the only attitude worthy of survival in the present millennium of street and dreams. . . . Long live the Negroes of Watts, the Puerto Ricans of Chicago, the Provos of Amsterdam, the Zengakuren of Japan and the youth of all countries who burn cop cars in the streets and demonstrate by these exemplary manifestations that the struggle for freedom cannot be guided by the rulebooks of priests and politicians.”12 Two years later, the Chicago surrealists also included Matta in an exhibition titled Protest, asserting, “In 1968 as in 1925 surrealists everywhere remain ‘specialists in revolt.’ Our aim is not the creation of ‘Art’ but the total liberation of man!”13 Matta was especially well placed to speak to global surrealism. As Octavio Paz observed, the painter had a unique position in the geographical, historical, and spiritual triangle of South America (Chile), Europe (Paris), and North America (New York and Mexico), allowing him to comment on Western politics from many vantage points and through numerous iconographies.14 Matta also established himself as a central figure with ties to the surrealists in both the United States and France, despite being expelled from the group in New York in 1948 for “moral ignominy,” a reference to an affair he had with Arshile Gorky’s wife, Agnes Magruder.15 However, Matta returned to the surrealist fold in the late 1950s, attending Jean Benoît’s performance piece Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade at the opening of the 1959 EROS exhibition at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris, and participating in the 1965 L’Écart absolu exhibition at the Galerie de l’Œil. Matta’s Burn, Baby, Burn must be viewed within this wider sixties frame of a burgeoning collective surrealist revolt that was spreading globally and was buttressed by the movement’s long-standing anticolonialist, antiracist stance, from 117

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the mid-1920s to their support of Black Power in their magazine L’Archibras (1967–69), discussed below.16

A Roaring Inferno The composition of Burn, Baby, Burn reflects contemporary press reports and television footage of the Watts riots, in which looting, flames raging out of control, and burning cars and buildings were widely documented; reporters often emphasized the riots’ tornado-like atmosphere. Life magazine dedicated a special issue to the Watts riots on August 27, 1965, with a cover story and eleven pages of color photographs. Its editorial noted that the riots took place just days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, observing that “the enforcement of laws is still far from equal in many cities. . . . It is the nature of revolution (and Negro equality is a revolution), to discover new demands after the first ones are achieved.”17 In one Life article, titled “In a Roaring Inferno, ‘Burn, Baby, Burn,’” Marc Crawford reported driving through Watts and watching as a supermarket was torched with six gasoline-filled Coke bottles; as firefighters attempted to stop the flames an hour later, Crawford wrote, “Negros threw bricks and screamed ‘Burn, baby, burn!’”18 Crawford, a Black man, noted his own fear, though his car was not stopped by rioters thanks to the color of his skin. The article was accompanied by color photographs of firemen, rioters, the pillaging of stores, buildings in flames, and aerial shots of Watts covered in billowing smoke. One showed two young Black boys, Leo and Randy Kidd, aged eleven and nine, respectively, one with his eyes tightly shut, the other bare chested and crying, beside a police officer. The photo’s caption, “Two Little Prisoners,” informed the reader that the boys were lined up for a mug shot and charged with looting before being returned to their parents; the article further explained that police arrested some five hundred children under the age of eighteen during the riots. The gravity of the situation and the violence of the imagery in this eleven-page section is strikingly, and ironically, counterpointed by the luxury of much of the rest of the magazine, with advertisements for men’s fashion, Sunkist oranges, Ford motor cars, and Marlboro cigarettes, and a long article on the nineteen-month-old chubby blond Nelson Rockefeller Jr., enjoying palatial gardens with his mother on their family estate in Maine. The contrast between the poverty of the predominantly Black, unemployed community of Watts and the typical white, educated, middle-class reader of the popular magazine could not have been more glaring. In Paris in December 1965, Matta’s friends in the anarchist Situationist International group reported on the events in Watts in a different way: “August 13–16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. . . . By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine Against the Liquidators

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the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control.” The Situationist International stated that it was reporting on the Watts riots “not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives.”19 Matta had befriended Asger Jorn, who helped found the Situationist International, while they were both working under Corbusier in the 1930s, and had renewed contact with him in Italy in the mid-1950s. By the mid-1960s, members of the Situationist International were calling on their comrades to support the “proletarians of Watts,” and to activate that support through artistic representation, as “Nothing is too beautiful for the negros of Watts.”20

History as a Continuum in Space Matta’s work as an assistant to Josep Lluís Sert in the design of the pavilion for the Spanish Republic at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition led him to abandon architecture for painting. He met Pablo Picasso, whose mural Guernica (1937)—addressing the horrific bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Franco’s forces and the German Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War—made a huge impression on him. Matta was of partly Basque origin, and in his notebooks he wrote of the Civil War affecting his morale and that of his colleagues while they worked on the pavilion.21 André Breton soon invited Matta to participate in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Galérie Beaux-Arts in Paris (January 17–February 24, 1938) and to write for the surrealist journal Minotaure. Matta’s first article for the journal reflected his new direction, as he proposed a surrealist architecture that would enclose the individual like a womb, with soft walls open to fear and desire alike; this organic and affective sense of space would become central to his artistic style.22 In his paintings, he refused a flat, frontal perspective, aiming instead to create images of multiple scenes, dimensions, and perspectives. This was in keeping with his view of history—and indeed of his own work as a form of history painting, for he described history in later years as “a continuum in space.”23 Having fled Paris for New York with his wife, Anne, when war broke out in Europe in 1939, Matta soon befriended abstract expressionists and new American surrealists such as Dorothea Tanning, leading to his first solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery in April 1940. Matta also developed a new painterly vocabulary on his move to the United States, which reflected his concern with creating an immersive form of painting that would lure the spectator into a psychic, or cinematic, awareness of space. It led Clement Greenberg to describe Matta as “that prince of the comic strippers” in the 1940s.24 Matta explained this shift in his work as a move away from a Freudian “psychological morphology” toward a more political “social morphology.” The shift came in 1941, when Matta made a trip with Robert Motherwell to Mexico and was impressed by the murals of Diego Rivera, 119

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David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. Matta’s shift also responded to the burgeoning horrors of world war, which he described as “torture chambers . . . cultures confronting each other. Battlegrounds of feelings and ideas.” In terms of Matta’s technique, this manifested itself as a new “violence in the use of paint,” as he put it.25 The painting Le vertige d’eros, produced between November 1943 and January 1944, demonstrated this new painterly intensity and use of radial space in the depiction of hallucinogenic molecular structures (see color plate 12). William Rubin read the painting as an exploration of the individual’s predicament between life and death, Eros and Thanatos, in a time of war.26 Certainly, it was intended to portray an abyss. Increasingly, that vertiginous quality in Matta’s paintings was directed toward a more overt form of political activism, of which Burn, Baby, Burn would later become a famous example.

Representing the World’s Laceration In 1947, Breton acknowledged the crucial role Matta played for surrealism in a war-torn world, writing, “To express the world’s laceration, one must have known the whole laceration within the confines of one’s own self. And to give the world, beyond this laceration, some grounds for hope, one must also, at all costs, have some intimate experience of resurrection.” For Breton, Matta’s aesthetic fusion of the machine and the human echoed those of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, and Marcel Duchamp, and what he termed their respective “mechanical” visions, but did so in a particularly intense manner, as world war allowed death, in Breton’s words, to “spread itself on a hitherto unknown scale.”27 In an early film script titled The Earth Is a Man (1936), written in Stockholm on December 31, 1936, in response to the Spanish Civil War and the death of poet Federico García Lorca, Matta evoked “silence and whips, primeval noises, sounds of blood in veins, clocks of flesh, whiplashes of the aorta searching for shores.”28 In 1943, in the poem “The Apples We Know,” he interwove love, destruction, war, and liberty in a universe torn by “the signs of passions” and “social voids” in which “man loves the light like a moth.”29 That poem was written at a time in Matta’s life when the war was interrupted by the birth of his twin sons, Batan (John Sebastian) and Gordon, and it shows that Matta was searching for a discourse with which to address the body politic through the erotic, fragmented, fragile body. A sense of the artwork as a battleground is also found in Être avec (1946), in which Matta portrays male and female bodies spread-eagled on torture machines with wailing mouths on totemic heads; these images were influenced by the tribal art of Oceania and the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, which Matta had recently discovered and begun to collect.30 Matta moved back to Europe at the end of 1948, first to France and then to Italy, where he bought a house on Panarea, one of the Aeolian Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, north of Against the Liquidators

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Sicily. His gallerist Daniel Cordier regularly exhibited his work in Paris, Frankfurt, and New York, and through the fifties his work was noted for its political subject matter. For example, in 1951, in response to the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg at the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism in the United States, he painted Les roses sont belles. The young Jewish American couple, accused of providing secrets about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, were found guilty and executed by the electric chair on June 19, 1953. There was a national and international outcry over this sentence, which was widely denounced for its harshness and perceived antisemitism. While the presiding judge, Irving R. Kaufman, condemned the Rosenbergs for what he called a crime “worse than murder,” Jean-Paul Sartre denounced “a legal lynching that has covered the whole nation [of the United States] in blood.”31 Les roses sont belles is dominated by a gray palette and depicts a trial scene with science fiction resonances, in which enraged humanoids with outstretched hands and clenched fists gesture toward a central pit suggesting purgatory or hell. Matta’s canvases La question (1957) and La question Djamila (1960) continued to address the injustice of political oppression, but now in the case of France and its colony Algeria. Both paintings allude to the crisis of the Algerian War (1954–62), the subject of heated debate among his circle of artists and intellectuals. The tortured body became the subject of many avant-garde paintings and texts at this time—prompted by the journalist Henri Alleg’s book La question, which recounted his experience of torture at the hands of French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers in 1957. Alleg’s book sold sixty-five thousand copies in France before being seized by the authorities, while the translated edition was a best seller in the United States. In 1959, Matta joined forces with André Breton, Francis Picabia, Benjamin Péret, Edouard Jaguer, Victor Brauner, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, Yves Tanguy, and others in denouncing the Algerian War in an issue of the review Front Unique, which was edited by the young militant artist Jean-Jacques Lebel and supported the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) against French imperialism. In 1960, the horrendous case of the Algerian woman Djamila Boupacha became the subject of another worldwide scandal. Boupacha, a militant alleged to have planted bombs for the FLN, confessed to the French military under physical and sexual torture, galvanizing intellectuals, writers, and artists into action. Simone de Beauvoir publicly demanded an inquiry in an article in Le Monde, having felt, as she explained in her memoirs, that the torture going on in Algeria exposed all of “this country, my own self [as] all murderers, all guilty.”32 Matta explained his painting La question in an interview in 1959 as the product of an age of “anti-eros” and spoke of fire ripping the represented female figure, burning flesh from limbs, as an element that could not be controlled or disciplined.33 Fire could imply love, but here it denoted hell. In La question Djamila, he depicted the same prone female, now encircled by militia, their weapons arranged as 121

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if crucifying her flesh. A commanding work at two by three meters in size, it won him the Marzotto Prize in Italy in 1962, a prize established in 1951 to honor artworks with sociopolitical impact. As Alain Jouffroy said of Matta’s art around this time, it aimed to illuminate the “psychology of terror which many men can exercise over one person.”34

A Revolutionary Poetics As these various works demonstrate, Matta, like other artists and intellectuals of his avant-garde circle, was increasingly drawn to taking overt and leftist political positions in his art, exhibitions, and interviews. In 1965, alongside Burn, Baby, Burn, he produced paintings titled Alabama, Vietnam, and Santo Domingo, and twelve drawings addressing the Vietnam War were exhibited in his solo show What’s happening baby? in January–February 1967 at the Galleria Senior in Rome. In an interview with Max Kozloff in Artforum in 1965, Matta explained that there was a pressing need “to visualize history” and said that “art has always been a reflection of the need to re-present reality.”35 In 1966, in the Swiss newspaper La Tribune de Lausanne, he expressed the desire that “on leaving my exhibition the visitor should have a desire to make a revolution.”36 In January 1968, his political affiliations were clear when a delegation of the French Communist Party visited an exhibition of his work in Paris and was photographed in animated discussion with him in the newspaper the Saint Denis Républicain.37 At this time, he also traveled to his native Chile, where he was noted for his support of Socialist president Salvador Allende, a visit that inspired the celebratory four-by-twenty-four-meter mural The First Goal of the Chilean People, which was later painted over by Augusto Pinochet’s regime (only to be restored in 2008).38 Matta visited Cuba in 1948, 1954, 1963, and 1966, and again from January 4 to 11, 1968, when he attended the Cultural Congress of Havana, a global meeting of intellectuals to discuss the problems of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the “Year of the Heroic Guerrilla.” In an event that brought together more than four hundred artists, writers, musicians, philosophers, economists, scientists, and sociologists from more than seventy countries, Matta gave a speech titled “The Internal Guerrilla,” insisting on the importance of creative freedom without fear of reprisal or tyranny. Matta also joined the Paris Surrealist Group at this time. In a tract titled “Pour Cuba,” dated November 14, 1967, and launched by the “surrealist movement,” Matta lent his support to the Organization of Latin American Solidarity and Fidel Castro and denounced the recent murder of Che Guevara. The surrealist tract was reproduced in the March 1968 issue of L’Archibras, edited by Jean Schuster, who also penned an essay titled “Flamboyant de Cuba, arbre de la liberté,” in which he claimed that the Cuban Revolution was “exemplary” in a dehumanized world expressed by the hybrid forms of Matta’s paintings.39 This issue of L’Archibras demonstrated the surrealists’ increased political militancy and Against the Liquidators

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their vocal support of Black Power in the United States, and also of student activism at the University of Paris at Nanterre, which was at its height at this time. The cover of the edition depicted a black telephone with “B-L-A-C-K-P-O-W-E-R” spelled out on the dial in place of numbers (see fig. 1.2), and featured an article by the Black Beat poet Ted Joans titled “Black Flower” that aligned Black Power, surrealism, and the quest for liberty, as Joans envisioned black flowers overtaking American imperialism. Franklin and Penelope Rosemont’s 1966 essay “Situation of Surrealism in the U.S.A.” was also translated in this issue. The Rosemonts expressed surrealist solidarity with the Watts rioters, writing, “The Splendid Watts (Los Angeles) Insurrection of 1965 should not be seen as an isolated fragment of revolt, but as part of a deeper, more complex pattern woven on the other side of the ‘American dream,’ with other threads of varying brilliance and strength running through the entire fabric of contemporary life.”40 Burn, Baby, Burn was exhibited in February 1968 in Matta’s major exhibition at the Musée de Saint Denis, a district one critic called “the red belt” of Paris for its working-class credentials. He praised Matta’s huge canvases for bringing together “eroticism, torture and electricity.”41 Alain Jouffroy singled out Burn, Baby, Burn in his review of the show, describing it as a work “against the American escalation and napalm bombings of Vietnam” and a key work in Matta’s “revolutionary poetic.” Jouffroy even asserted that Matta’s art was an extension of the language of civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, the Trinidadian-born leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a figurehead for Black Power, and a militant voice against Vietnam.42 Jouffroy’s determination to link Matta and Black Power reminds us how members of the New Left in Paris were in regular communication with their American counterparts, championing the Watts riots and identifying with the Black Power movement as well as with China, Vietnam, and Cuba. It also reminds us of the dialogue and camaraderie between American and French intellectuals and artists.43 Both Jouffroy and Matta would soon take part in the events of May ’68 in Paris—student discussions, demonstrations, and sit-ins. Matta also produced four protest posters, one of which incorporated morphing and machinelike figures reminiscent of Burn, Baby, Burn and called radicals to action: “Disciples, occupy the discipline: For a revolutionary discipline” (Disciples occupez la discipline: Pour une discipline révolutionnaire). As such, Matta’s painting not only depicted Black Power struggles in the United States but connected them to a global movement that aspired to the utopian transformation of the world.

Notes

1. Fraser, “Encounters in New York,” 28. 2. Matta, Entretiens morphologiques, 210.

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3. Matta: Le cube ouvert, 292. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

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4. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, 21. Matta, Entretiens morphologiques, 15. 209. 22. Matta, “Mathématique sensible architecture.” 5. Shapiro and Sullivan, Race Riots, 209. 23. Roberto Matta, interview by Nancy Miller, in 6. Ibid., 210. Miller, Matta: The First Decade, 10–17, 12. 7. Montague, with Baker, Burn, Baby! Burn, 1–2. 24. Quoted in Ashton, New York School, 159. 8. Davis and Wiener, Set the Night on Fire, 208, 25. Kozloff, “Interview with Matta,” 25. 214. 26. Rubin, Matta, 4. 9. Ibid., 209. 27. Breton, “Matta, Three Years Ago,” 190–91. 10. Horne, Fire This Time, 58, 327. 28. Matta met Lorca in December 1935, an 11. It should be noted that Black Power activists encounter that led him “to see everything in a called it a rebellion, not a riot. See Ture and different light.” Carrasco, Matta conversaciones, Hamilton, Black Power, 189. 50–51. 12. “The Forecast Is Hot!,” in Rosemont, 29. Matta, “The Apples We Know,” in Entretiens Rosemont, and Garon, Forecast Is Hot, 10. The morphologiques, 171. Dutch Provos were founded in 1965 and led 30. Matta purchased Inuit masks and other by philosophy student Roel van Duijn and artifacts in New York with Breton, Georges Duthuit, performance artist Robert Jasper Grootveld; the Robert Lebel, Max Ernst, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marxist Japanese student Zengakuren movement and with the assistance of the primitive art dealer was founded in 1948 and witnessed militant student Karl Bach. See Matta, “Masques esquimaux, action against police in the sixties over the Vietnam masques haida,” in Entretiens morphologiques, 149. War and Japan’s cooperation in it. 31. Quoted in Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 13. “Protest,” in Rosemont, Rosemont, and Garon, 31–32. Forecast Is Hot, 44. 32. Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 397. 14. Paz, “Vestibule,” 24. 33. Quoted in Alvard, “Hypertension,” 26. 15. For further details, see Sebbag, “Roberto 34. Jouffroy, “‘Question’ de Matta,” 90. Matta,” 62. 35. Kozloff, “Interview with Matta,” 26. 16. Examples of surrealism’s anticolonial stance 36. Quoted in Descargues, “Matta: Au sortir de include the 1925 manifesto in protest of the Rif War; mon exposition.” the 1931 exhibition Truth About the Colonies; the 37. Saint Denis Républicain, “Exposition Matta 1946 pamphlet Liberty Is a Vietnamese Word, and suscite.” the “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in 38. Fletcher, Crosscurrents of Modernism, 249. the Algerian War,” also known as the “Declaration 39. Schuster, “Flamboyant de Cuba,” 50, 51. of the 121,” of 1960, signed by André Breton, André 40. Franklin Rosemont and Penelope Rosemont, Masson, José Pierre, and others. “Situation of Surrealism in the U.S.A.” (1966), in 17. Life, “Editorial: Some Negroes Riot.” Rosemont, Rosemont, and Garon, Forecast Is Hot, 1. 18. Crawford, “In a Roaring Inferno.” 41. Lavard, “Paris.” 19. Debord, “Decline and Fall,” 153. 42. Jouffroy, “Poétique révolutionnaire,” 63. 20. Viénet, “Situationists,” 184–85. 43. See Shiel, “Los Angeles and Hollywood.”

Bibliography

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Alvard, Julien. “Hypertension: La peinture murale de Matta.” Quadrum 6 (1959): 26–30. Ashton, Dore. The Life and Times of the New York School. London: Adams and Dart, 1972. Beauvoir, Simone de. Force of Circumstance. Translated by Peter Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Breton, André. “Matta, Three Years Ago . . .” In Surrealism and Painting (1965), translated by Simon Watson Taylor, 189–94. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Against the Liquidators

Carrasco, Eduardo. Matta conversaciones. Santiago: Ediciónes Chile y América–CESOC, 1987. Crawford, Marc. “In a Roaring Inferno, ‘Burn, Baby, Burn.’” Life, August 27, 1965, 27. Davis, Mike, and Jon Wiener. Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties. New York: Verso, 2020. Debord, Guy. “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” 1965. In The Situationist International: Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, 153–60. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. Descargues, Pierre. “Matta: Au sortir de mon exposition le visiteur devrait avoir envie de

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fair la révolution.” La Tribune de Lausanne, May 29, 1966. Fletcher, Valerie. Crosscurrents of Modernism: Four Latin American Pioneers. Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1992. Exhibition catalog. Fraser, Valerie. “Encounters in New York, Printmaking in Chile.” American Art 26, no. 2 (2012): 28–33. Horne, Gerald. Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Jouffroy, Alain. “La poétique révolutionnaire de Matta.” Opus international 5 (February 1968): 62–63. ———. “‘La question’ de Matta.” In Révolution du regard: À propos de quelques peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, 83–91. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Kozloff, Max. “An Interview with Matta.” Artforum, September 1965, 23–26. Lavard, Julien. “Paris.” Art News 66, no. 10 (1968): 24. Life. “Editorial: Some Negroes Riot but Most Go Forward.” August 27, 1965, 4. Matta: Le cube ouvert. Lucerne: Musée des BeauxArts, 1965. Exhibition catalog. Matta, Roberto. “Mathématique sensible architecture du temps.” Minotaure, no. 11 (May 15, 1938): 43. ———. Matta: Entretiens morphologiques; Notebook No. 1, 1936–1944. Edited by Germana Ferrari. London: Sistan, 1987. Miller, Nancy, ed. Matta: The First Decade. Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum, 1982. Exhibition catalog. Montague, Nathaniel, with Bob Baker. Burn, Baby! Burn! The Autobiography of Magnificent Montague. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Paz, Octavio. “Vestibule.” 1985. In Matta: Surrealism and Beyond, edited by Curtis L. Carter and Thomas R. Monahan, 23–25. Wisconsin:

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Haggerty Museum of Art, 1997. Exhibition catalog. Rosemont, Franklin, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon, eds. The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts and Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, 1966–1976. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997. Rubin, William. Matta. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1957. Exhibition catalog. Saint Denis Républicain. “L’exposition Matta suscite un très vif intérêt.” January 5, 1968. Schuster, Jean. “Flamboyant de Cuba, arbre de la liberté.” L’Archibras, no. 3 (March 1968): 48–53. Sebbag, Georges. “Roberto Matta.” In International Encylopedia of Surrealism, vol. 3, Surrealists M–Z, edited by Michael Richardson, Dawn Ades, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Steven Harris, and Georges Sebbag, 58–66. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Shapiro, Fred C., and James W. Sullivan. Race Riots: New York, 1964. New York: Crowell, 1964. Shiel, Mark. “Los Angeles and Hollywood in Film and French Theory: Agnès Varda’s Lions Love . . . and Lies (1969) and Edgar Morin’s Journal de Californie (1970).” In Cinematic Urban Geographies: Screening Spaces, edited by François Penz and Richard Koeck, 245–68. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Ture, Kwame [Stokely Carmichael], and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Viénet, Rene. “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art.” Internationale situationniste, no. 11 (October 1967): 32–36. Reprinted in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, edited by Tom McDonough, 181–86. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

A Consciousness of Being

The Fantasy of a Powerful Myth The Situationist International After Surrealism Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires. —Graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne, May–June 1968

7.

As an addition to art history, surrealism’s existence in the realm of cultural production is like the shadow of an absent figure in a painting by de Chirico: it makes visible the lack of a muchneeded future. —Guy Debord, 1958

At a quarter to nine on the evening of November 18, 1958, a debate about surrealism took place at rue de Rennes on the Left Bank in Paris. The Cercle Ouvert, the event’s host and organizer, titled it “Surrealism—Is It Dead or Alive?” and advertised a lineup of speakers that included the Marxist philosopher and theoretician

of everyday life Henri Lefebvre, the former Dadaist Tristan Tzara, the pataphysician Robert Amadou, the science fiction writer Jacques Sternberg, and a member of the newly created Situationist International, Guy Debord. But when the day arrived, Lefebvre and Amadou came down with flu, Sternberg had food poisoning, and Tzara simply never made it, leaving a single speaker: the twenty-seven-year-old situationist, Debord. Nevertheless, the event went ahead, with the critic and writer Noël Arnaud, who had been involved in offshoot surrealist groups like La Main à Plume and Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire, taking the chair. Arnaud opened with a long introduction, in which he declared the title of the debate to be misleading: “Our idea is not so much to investigate whether surrealism has disappeared or is still alive as to try to see how and in which forms it exists and whether it lives up to the exigencies it once advanced.”1 Arnaud

continued by outlining the surrealist project as André Breton had presented it twenty years earlier, talking about the continued relevance of surrealism. Breton himself had declined to participate in the debate, though he sent a letter, read by Arnaud as part of his introduction, accusing Amadou and Sternberg of being “unemployed gravediggers.” Breton went on to announce the publication of the fourth issue of Surréalisme and the launch of a new surrealist journal, Bief, jonction surréaliste. Breton clearly intended it as an outright dismissal of the terms of the debate: surrealism was alive! After Breton’s letter, Arnaud read aloud letters from Amadou and Sternberg.2 Arnaud then introduced Debord—whose name was misspelled “Debore” on the poster announcing the debate (fig. 7.1). “M. Guy Debord,” Arnaud began, “who through the Lettrist experience has arrived at conceptions he terms Situationist, will respond to or reject the invitation André Breton launched twenty years ago.” Debord took the stage, placed a tape recorder on the table, sat down next to it, produced a bottle of whiskey, and hit “play” to begin his prerecorded talk. Accompanied by dissonant music, Debord’s somewhat monotonous recorded voice stated, “Obviously, surrealism is alive. Its very creators have not yet died, and new members, although of increasingly mediocre quality, adhere to Fig. 7.1  Poster for “Surrealism—Is It Dead or Alive?,” Cercle Ouvert, 44 rue de Rennes, Paris, it. The general public thinks of surrealism as November 18, 1958. the furthest extreme of modernism and, elsewhere, it has become the object of academic study. It is very much a matter of one of those things whose existence is contemporaneous with our own, like Catholicism and General de Gaulle.”3 Surrealism was dismissed right away; it was just one expression of contemporary postwar bourgeois society. In other words, surrealism was not the avant-garde. Members of the audience, which included veteran surrealists like Benjamin Péret and newcomers like Jean Schuster, immediately started protesting and booing.4 Jean-Jacques Lebel, who had just joined the surrealist ranks, threw a heavy architectural journal he had recently bought in the direction of the tape recorder. Other agitated members of the new generation of surrealists, such as Gérard Legrand and Georges Goldfayn, started setting fire to pieces of paper that they aimed at Debord. As the audience raged, the taped 129

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presentation drove yet another nail into the coffin of surrealism: “Surrealism today is thoroughly boring and reactionary. Surrealist dreams are mere bourgeois impotence, artistic nostalgia, and a refusal to envisage the liberating use of our era’s superior technological means. Seizing such means for use in collective, concrete experimentation with new environments and behaviors is the start of a cultural revolution that cannot exist apart from these means. It is in this direction that my comrades in the Situationist International are advancing.” The latter statement was followed by several minutes of prerecorded applause, followed by a voice saying, “You have been listening to Guy Debord, spokesman for the Situationist International. This intervention was brought to you by the Open Circle.”5 Finally, a woman’s voice—that of Debord’s fellow situationist Michèle Bernstein—concluded the recording with a message that pastiched a radio ad: “But don’t forget, your most urgent task remains the fight against dictatorship in France.”6 Debord and the situationists could hardly have made it more apparent: surrealism was a thing of the past, and the Situationist International was the new avant-garde. It was time to bury the surrealist dream and replace it with the situationist cultural revolution.7 This essay discusses the way in which the Situationist International tried to radicalize the surrealist project. As a newly established avant-garde group in 1950s Paris, the situationists had to distance themselves from surrealism, publicly ridiculing Breton and the surrealists, all the while giving surrealism a more explicitly political dimension by substituting the marvelous with the critique of spectacle. In retrospect, however, it is obvious that the two groups are part of the same attack on the alienation of capitalist society. Despite Debord’s harsh critique of surrealism, the Situationist International can be regarded as a radicalization of the more political side of the surrealist project.

From Avant-Garde to the Lost Children of Class War The Situationist International—which, according to Debord, not only continued but, even more important, surpassed surrealism—had been founded in Italy the year before, in 1957, by members of the International Lettriste Movement, the Movement for an Imaginary Bauhaus and the London Psychogeographical Association. In a document Debord presented at the founding meeting, the program of the new organization was laid out in language that sought to combine a Hegelian-Marxist critique of capitalist society with the radical provocations of the interwar avant-gardes. The project was to develop and practice a radical critique of capitalist society as a global totality, what the situationists would later call the society of the spectacle. From Marxism and the ultraleft, the situationists picked up a radical critique of the established economic-political order and its monetary and state power, but also a rejection of any reformist approach to capitalism; only a complete and ruthless critique and the abolition of capitalist society was The Right to Insubordination

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relevant. They combined this heretical socialism with the (anti-)artistic experiments of avant-gardes like Dada and surrealism. The situationist stance involved a radical critique of any institutionalized activity. The combined thrust of the young Marx and the interwar avant-garde gave them a mission: capitalist society had to go, and they had an active role to play in its downfall. It was crucial to reject compromise: the spectacle worked best when confronted with partial critiques. The spectacle was perfectly capable of integrating limited attacks or seemingly critical gestures that did not have the proper understanding of the historical situation and the stakes of the struggle. Thanks to this ultracritical position, and the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history to which the organization subscribed, the situationists were able to analyze and point to society’s self-representation—that is, to the fact that modern society had no other content than its representation of itself—but this also meant that the group had a totalizing understanding of consciousness.8 Following Dada and surrealism’s example, the situationist group attempted to realize art. It was not a question of trying to connect art and politics or to “politicize” art: the revolution would be the abolition of the separate activities of art and politics. In modern capitalist society, the freedom of the artist was the other side of the coin of workers’ alienation. It was only the artist who could be truly creative. Art mirrored the money economy and thus had to go, had to be abolished in order to set free “the freedom of art.”9 In the society of the spectacle, art necessarily remained a broken manifestation of a fragmented society. The situationist program was to set poetry free for everybody in a transformed Communist world. The failure of surrealism, the situationists argued, had been its inability to move the revolutionary struggle into broader territory, to bring it out of the art institution and into everyday life, and to move away from experiments with automatic writing toward realized cultural revolution. For the situationists, it was all or nothing. The stakes had already been high for the surrealists in the 1920s and ’30s, but they were even higher in the late 1950s for the small situationist vanguard. It was not possible to engage in minor subversive acts inside the institution. The transgressive potential of art had to be set free outside the academy, transforming everyone into an active producer of a new life beyond capitalism. Artists had to abandon art, stop producing individual artworks, and instead devote themselves to the cultural revolution. The situationists considered the cultural revolution to be an expansion of the interwar avant-garde project in which “experimentators” engaged in an “art of war”—that is, engaged in class war after the defeat of modern art (and “the first efforts and defeats of the proletarian revolution”).10 Modern art was dead, the situationist movement believed: it died when the Communist revolutionary movement was defeated in the mid-1920s. But capitalist society remained characterized by a fundamental fracture that would necessarily continue to 131

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produce antagonistic subjects: the proletariat. The Situationist International conceived itself as an active part of the proletarian self-organization that was taking place, with a view to ending capitalism. The situationists were “enfants perdus [lost children]” of an “as-yet immobile horde” that was foreshadowing “the second proletarian onslaught on class society.”11 In retrospect, it is clear that the situationists had to denounce surrealism in order to set the stage for their own attempt to supersede art. They were confronted with the same paradox that the surrealists faced: that of trying to attack capitalist society with the language and images of said capitalist society. Both groups were gesturing toward a different way of living, but they were doing so from within the spectacle.

The New Forms of Domination Continuing Marx’s critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production, the situationists analyzed the spectacle as the capitalist mode of production’s totalized form, in which capital becomes an image. The domination of capital had been accomplished by the “general commodification of fetishes, in the production of and consumption of material and symbolic goods that all had the character of being an appearance.”12 Life, reality, and the relations individuals create together had distanced them from reality in the form of representations and mystifications of their real relations, such that wo/man had ended up living in the categories of this representation, which thus became reality. “The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images. It is far better viewed as a weltanschauung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm—a world view transformed into an objective force,” as Debord put it in The Society of the Spectacle.13 The spectacle was a new phase in the accumulation of capital in which more and more forms of human sociality were subsumed to the market. Everyday life, “leisure,” and previous forms of aesthetic resistance were becoming part of commodity exchange. The situationists described this as a “colonization of everyday life” whereby new means of technological reproduction made possible new forms of social control. Radio and television were not important in themselves for the situationists—the theory of the spectacle cannot be reduced to a historical version of “new media studies”—but were important as technologies that made it possible for the capitalist state in a new period of capitalist expansion to disseminate appearances and effect a new kind of alienation outside the factory, in everyday life. The spectacle was ideology materialized; it was the supreme form of alienation by which real life had been stripped of authenticity and transformed into disconnected fragments, while images of life became detached from it and formed an ensemble. This The Right to Insubordination

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arsenal of images took on a life of its own and made impossible a Communist use of the productive forces that were now so developed that wo/man could actually leave mere survival behind and start to live a historical life. Yet the spectacle made that impossible, producing an always already built world with no exit. The situationists believed that the spectacle, in its attempt to prevent a second proletarian offensive and a different use of emergent productive forces, had intensified alienation by reducing all lived experience to representations that existed autonomously, in a parallel world beyond the reach and control of the individual. People had been transformed into spectators, renouncing life and developing false needs that were satisfied by an extended repertoire of new consumer goods. The situationist organization opposed this development and sought to transform the nascent “spontaneous negativism” present throughout the spectacle into revolutionary action. The spectacle tried its best to dull people and turn their needs into commodity-based desires, but the “original” contradiction between capital and labor—false needs and authentic, or radical needs—would always reappear. The task of the situationist avant-garde was thus to help the development of radical needs and present a historical consciousness that could turn scattered protests into a genuine proletarian refusal of the spectacle. Whenever people realized that the spectacle was a life of mere survival, “a nightmarish life,” the situationists sought to connect that insight with “the rediscovery of the real revolutionary movement in the past.”14 All over the world, young proletarians were rejecting the ideology of the spectacle through eruptions of violence and delinquency, the situationists argued: “The new contestation that the Situationists are talking about is already manifesting itself everywhere,” wrote Debord.15 In their journal, they took pains to analyze such incidents and frame them as symptoms of regenerating outbursts—trying to put them in the right context and see them as the return of class struggle. It was important to strengthen and advance the partial and often spontaneous rejection of the spectacle. It was a question of acquiring the right historical consciousness, of understanding the spectacle and its ability to recover isolated radical gestures. The situationists attacked what they perceived to be a naïve belief in art and politics as the illusionary means of emancipation from commodity capitalism. The question of art led to a split in the Situationist International in 1961–62, when most of the members who had an artistic practice were excluded or left the group. The Second Situationist International was established by Asger Jorn’s younger brother, the Danish artist and writer Jørgen Nash. Nash was skeptical of Debord’s turn to the ultraleft and his attempt to revive the Hegelian-Marxist analysis of the capitalist mode of production. With a view to mobilizing the proletariat, he considered art to be the main arena for the situationist group and wanted to realize this by provoking the public through public scandals. The 133

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First Situationist International wanted to end art in a revolutionary transformation; the Second International wanted to realize art here and now.16 Only a full-scale Communist revolution would make a different life possible. The spectacle was well equipped to co-opt every subversive gesture in favor of the accumulation of capital. “We must keep moving ahead, without attaching ourselves to anything either in modern culture or its negation. We do not want to work toward the spectacle of the end of the world, but toward the end of the world of spectacle,” the situationists maintained.17 Only the complete destruction of the cultural-industrial production of the spectacle was worthwhile: limited gains and compromises were off the table. “As capitalism’s ever-intensifying imposition of alienation at all levels makes it increasingly hard for workers to recognize and name their own impoverishment, and eventually puts them in the position of having either to reject it in its totality or do nothing at all, the revolutionary organization must learn that it can no longer combat alienation by means of alienated forms of struggle.”18 For the situationists, who absolutized the avantgarde’s dream of the transgressive gesture, neither artistic experiment nor political action would suffice. The modern artwork was to be replaced by the proletariat’s aesthetic emancipation, they argued. Their task, as representatives of the new avant-garde, was to enable the masses to seize power and control the means of production in order to effect the aesthetic transformation of society. Confronted with the recuperation of surrealism, the situationists could not articulate their critique of the institutionalization of art and capitalist alienation in the language of “the marvelous” and had to come up with new utopian visions suited to a situation where art was more closely integrated into the new consumer society. The problem was that any such attempt risked merely supplying the spectacle with new forms. Both groups tried desperately to oppose bourgeois society and the commodity economy but could only do so with a paradoxically blank opposition. Logic was to be confronted with “the marvelous,” the passive spectacle with “total participation.” It was a question of exceeding representation, gesturing toward an alternative that could not be put into words but had to be lived as a kind of realized romantic creativity.

Surrealism as Past Revolution One of the defining features of the spectacle was its ability to assimilate radical gestures and render them part of the repertoire of established taste, with its different niches and its internally competing public spheres. Without an understanding of the historical situation and a grasp of the spectacle as a whole, the status quo could not be challenged. Capital was reaching its tentacles into every sphere of human life, and nothing seemed beyond its reach. The radical experiments of modern art were a case in point.19 From the middle The Right to Insubordination

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of the nineteenth century to the late 1920s, modernism, according to the situationists, had been engaged in the critical project of breaking down expression. From Baudelaire to surrealism, it had excelled in creating a crisis of language, the situationists argued. Modern art had refused to be the fictive language of a nonexistent community. This was the revolutionary “terror” of modern art. But since the late 1920s, this iconoclastic project had come to a standstill, and modern art had become a mere image of refusal that only helped to consolidate capitalist domination. Regression had characterized art since the end of the 1920s, they argued. Contemporary art and culture, from the new novel of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, to the new wave of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, to the new realism of Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, merely “re-enacts as farce the tragedy of the murder of artistic forms.”20 It was no longer enough to show the pseudocommunication of modern society: instead, superior instruments needed to be invented that were capable of abolishing that society. The task of the avant-garde was to arrange “the environment that conditions us, transforming external nature” as well as “our own nature.” The tradition of modern art had been a useful and necessary lesson for the avant-garde, but now art was nothing but a form of alienation. “The world of artistic expression, whatever its content, has already lapsed.” Henceforth, art should be negated and realized in a radical critique of society in which individual artworks highlighting the impoverished language of the spectacle had to be replaced by “direct actions on affects.”21 For the situationists, surrealism was the end point in the history of modern art. “The surrealist program, asserting the sovereignty of desire and surprise, offering a new practice of life, is much richer in constructive possibilities than is generally thought,” Debord wrote in the program presented at the founding conference of the new situationist organization in 1957. With surrealism, the attempt to introduce new values in opposition to the ruling ideology of capitalist society reached its zenith but, Debord continued, also turned into something else, namely, the partial annexation of the new values. In order to divert the taste for new values, the bourgeoisie made use of surrealism’s ideas about desire and surprise, trivializing them and circulating them after sterilizing them. This was surrealism’s fate, the situationists argued. The movement had been characterized by “the universal will for change,” but it had collapsed beneath its own inability to change the world and had subsequently been absorbed into established taste.22 Small saleable surprises on offer for everybody: this was the destiny of surrealism. In other words, surrealism ended up as part of the spectacle, the situationists asserted. This of course had to do with historical development, in which the revolutionary offensive was destroyed by the concerted effort of Stalinism, Fascism, and the anti-Fascist mobilization of the Popular Front. The Communist revolutionary movement of the early 1920s was crushed, leaving movements like surrealism hanging in the air, devoid of a practical revolutionary base. The failure of surrealism, however, 135

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also had to do with surrealism itself and what the situationists considered its inability to abandon art. Surrealism continued Dada’s provocations, but it had downgraded the destructive character of Dada and ended up privileging art rather than negating it. Breton’s own side business as a buyer and seller of art was a tragicomic illustration of this “moderation” of surrealism by “commercial considerations.”23 Debord and the situationists could not resist making fun of Breton, much as they respected surrealism’s genuinely important attack on the bourgeois world: he had become a joke in their eyes. He not only traded in art but had fled the occupation while other artists joined the resistance. This capitulation, to them, confirmed the irrelevance of the surrealist project, not least its political dimension. Surrealism’s attempt to join forces with the interwar Communist movement had been important, but the fact that it was the already Stalinized French Communist Party that Breton, Louis Aragon, and others decided to join in 1927 highlighted the surrealists’ problematic political judgment. This had already been the stance of Asger Jorn in the late 1940s. Jorn himself had been active in the Danish resistance movement and was involved in setting up different surrealist splinter groups after the war, specifically the surréalistes-révolutionnaires and CoBrA, before founding the situationist organization with Debord, Bernstein, and others in 1957. Surrealism ended up as an artistic style and showed itself to be politically dubious. The situationists were hard on their predecessors. The beginning of the surrealist project had not begun that way, however, as the Situationist International stated repeatedly. Surrealism initially sought to contest the misery of modern bourgeois life and turned to the “marvelous” in the hope that it would somehow reenchant the world. The marvelous was everything they found missing in modern life, and was in itself an attack on the bourgeoisie. But, the situationists argued, it was also paradoxically a confirmation of the capitalist world in so far as it was merely the flip side of the rationality of the capitalist economy. Following Dada, Breton critiqued rationality and logic but limited his criticism to reversing rationality by proposing the existence of its opposite, in the form of the imagination, the unconscious, and the merveilleux. As Breton put in the first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” “We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. . . . The imagination is perhaps on the verge of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights.”24 The situationists considered surrealism’s embrace of the marvelous a half-baked critique of art and capitalist society, because surrealists posited a hidden real world that lay beneath boring bourgeois reality. As Debord put it, “The reason for the ideological failure of surrealism was its having wagered that the unconscious was the long-sought chief power of life.”25 For Breton, the existing world was irrelevant and boring, while the marvelous and the unconscious consisted of endless surprises. The Right to Insubordination

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The problem with pitting ennui against the fantastic, argued the situationists, was that in their desperate efforts to unleash the marvelous, the surrealists forgot to change the world. They somehow missed the fact that the actualization of the marvelous should go hand in hand with the destruction of the capitalist economy and its separation of work and art. The freedom of the artist in modern society was dependent on the oppression of the workers, they maintained: the revolution must therefore entail the joint eradication of art and the capitalist money economy. Surrealism’s realization of art lacked the vital negation of art (in which Dada had been engaged) and ended up as a theory in which the autonomy of art was replaced by the autonomy of the marvelous—while everything else remained the same.

Surrealism as Contemporary Rear Guard The revolutionary potential present in the period from 1916 to 1930 had not been released, and with the rise of a state-led consumer society, the conditions of possibility for the revolution changed. In the postwar economic boom, surrealism’s search for the marvelous was meaningless in revolutionary terms, the Situationist International claimed. While its enthusiasm for the unconscious and surprises had held progressive meaning as a cultural side dish to the revolutionary proletarian self-consciousness expressed in the revolutionary wave from 1917 to the late 1920s, this was no longer the case. As Raoul Vaneigem put it in the small book he wrote on surrealism in the late 1960s, “From a fortress open to every wind blowing in from the old world, it began—after the fashion of the Romantics reinventing an idyllic Middle Ages, complete with valiant knights, in the very shadow of the stock exchanges, banks and factories—to entertain the fantasy of a powerful myth, stripped of any religious overtones, that would combat the poverty of the spectacle and that would draw its strength from a reconsecration of human relationships modelled on the reconsecration of art.”26 When Debord made his presentation on surrealism in 1958, he argued that the surrealist interest in the marvelous had shown itself to be a regression with respect to Dada’s provocative ridiculing of the artwork—a regression that paved the way for the spectacle’s representational forms of domination. By juxtaposing logic with the marvelous, the surrealists remained prisoners of the very ideology they sought to attack, confirming the division between reality and expression. They remained too attached to a romantic and limited idea of the marvelous that gave up on direct action, preferring instead to dive into the unconscious, the childish, the dream world, and automatic writing, which they presented as an opposition to reality. But the spectacle-commodity economy had no problem incorporating the irrational and unusual objects of surrealism. Indeed, the surrealist objects and artworks were a much-needed renewal of the commodity. As Debord put it, “The reactionary side of 137

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surrealism appears straightaway in its overestimation of the unconscious and its monotonous artistic explorations.”27 A decade later, Vaneigem rephrased the critique: The proposition that “the eye exists in its savage state” was self-glorying in two equally unjustified ways. In the first place, this was a time when advertising and news media (not to mention the fascist “happenings” of the moment) already knew perfectly well how to manipulate clashing images, how to milk “free” representations for all they were worth; it was therefore quite predictable that the ruling system would co-opt the new way of looking that surrealism was so busily promoting. Secondly, it should have been plain—to any avant-garde worth the name at least—that the organization of social passivity, in its concern to minimize the recourse to police and army, was bound to foster the consumption of increasingly lifelike and increasingly personalized images, the aim being that the proletariat should move only to the extent required for the contemplation of its own inert contentment, that it should be rendered so passive as to be incapable of anything beyond infatuation with varied representations of its dreams.28

Surrealism paved the way for the spectacle. As Debord said in his presentation at the Open Circle debate, “surrealist dreams are mere bourgeois impotence.” It was no longer enough to oppose a bad reality with a marvelous dream; reality had to be transformed. It was a question of taking one’s desires for reality and revolutionizing the world, as the May ’68 graffiti put it. To be clear, surrealism had been hugely important for the situationists—but as a contemporary practice, they argued, it was not simply redundant but also a stumbling block for the production of radical needs. To its credit, surrealism (together with Dada) had been at the artistic forefront of the first revolutionary offensive, and in seeking to assert the sovereignty of desire and the marvelous, it had given art a significance that reached beyond the institution of art. Furthermore, it had understood the necessity of rallying to dialectical materialism. But surrealism’s Gothic version of Marxism had paradoxically made possible bureaucratic state capitalism through its alliance with the Stalinist French Communist Party (and later with Trotsky).29 In other words, in the eyes of the situationists, it had failed, and its failure revealed the need for “a revolutionary cultural program” that could integrate and thereby overcome the split between “artistic” and “political” critique. This was the task that the Situationist International set itself in 1958 and attempted to pursue until the early 1970s. The situationists were active in May 1968, when students occupied the Sorbonne and more than ten million French workers went on strike, bringing daily French life to a standstill and forcing de Gaulle to flee to a French army base in western Germany.30 The situationist critique of the spectacle fueled the partial rediscovery of a previous revolutionary Communist critique that covered the walls of the Sorbonne and other The Right to Insubordination

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occupied universities.31 The situationists themselves regarded the protests that were gaining strength in the late 1960s all over the world as the beginning of the end of “prehistory,” the beginning of the end of the spectacle.32 In the early 1970s, Debord reckoned that there was no longer a need for a formal organization for revolutionaries, that time was itself producing revolutionaries. As we know now, he was mistaken. The revolution he anticipated did not take place, and the cultural revolution never materialized—at least not in the form he and the other Situationists desired.

Fifty Years On We are now in a position to look back on the situationists’ project in the same way that they looked back on surrealism. But in assessing the contribution of the situationist organization to the revolutionary tradition, we must take account of the almost complete disappearance of the revolutionary perspective in the decades after the Situationist International was dissolved in 1972 with the publication of The Real Split of the International. The period from the late 1970s until today has been characterized by quiescence, dispersion, and defeat. The world upsurge of 1968 to 1977 in which the situationists played a part was followed by what François Cusset calls “a long neo-liberal counterrevolution” that managed to subdue the revolutionary perspective that was reestablished in the late 1960s.33 The post-1970s glaciation radically shook any belief in history and produced what Mark Fisher calls an era of “capitalist realism,” in which it was easier to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism.34 Debord’s description of the spectacle seems to have been confirmed in an almost tragicomic sense by subsequent historical developments in which history was replaced by commemoration and religious superstition. In postmodern society, revolutionary moments circulated as empty signifiers disconnected from their historical origins. Photos from May ’68 of protesting students and workers in Paris are used as the visual backdrop for designer clothes.35 History is commodified and replaced by fashionable signs of protest. The result is historical amnesia, a loss of history. The surrealists and situationists knew that the deck was stacked heavily against them, but they nonetheless tried to look for another type of life. They probably would not be surprised that their legacies ended up being co-opted by the very institutions they were trying to destroy: today, one can visit the Centre Pompidou to see Breton’s “wall,” with its various Mayan and Egyptian objects, a painting by Miró, an Iroquois mask, and a box of butterflies—and can consult Debord’s archive in the French National Library. If the marvelous had become a dead end by the 1950s, the idea of total participation is no less problematic today and should be subjected to the kind of critical analysis to which the situationists themselves subjected surrealism. 139

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Notes

1. Quoted in Berréby, Textes et documents 19. For accounts of the situationist theory situationnistes, 85–86. of art, see Bandini, Estetico il politico; Perniola, 2. Both of these letters seem to have disappeared. Situazionisti. See Duwa, Surréalistes et situationnistes, 192. 20. Situationist International, “Avant-Garde of 3. Debord, “Contribution to the Debate,” 67. Presence,” 139. 4. For a description of the event, see Bourseiller, 21. Situationist International, “Meaning of Decay Vie et mort de Guy Debord, 135–36. Bourseiller’s in Art,” 90–91. account is based on an interview with Jean-Jacques 22. Debord, “Report on the Construction,” 33, 32. Lebel, who had just joined the surrealist group and 23. Ibid., 33. was present as one among a number of agitated 24. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 9–10. surrealists. The situationists themselves reproduced 25. Debord, “Report on the Construction,” 33. a shortened version of Debord’s presentation “The error that is at the root of surrealism,” Debord and gave an account of the event in Situationist continued, “is the idea of the infinite wealth of the International, “Suprême levée des défenseurs.” unconscious imagination.” 5. Debord, “Contribution to the Debate,” 68. 26. Dupuis [Vaneigem], Cavalier History of 6. Ibid. For an analysis of the situationists’ Surrealism, 105–6. Vaneigem wrote the book analysis of de Gaulle’s coup in May 1958, see Bolt in the late 1960s while he was member of the Rasmussen, “Spectacle of de Gaulle’s Coup d’État.” situationist organization. It remained unpublished 7. For a presentation of the relationship and appeared in 1977 under the pseudonym Julesbetween the surrealist movement and the François Dupuis, the concierge of Lautréamont. For Situationist International, see Duwa, Surréalistes an account of the circumstances of the writing of et situationnistes. See also King, “Surrealism and the book, see Berréby and Vaneigem, Rien n’est fini, Counterculture”; Bolt Rasmussen, “Situationist 154–59. International, Surrealism.” 27. Debord, “Contribution to the Debate,” 67. 8. For an analysis of the avant-gardist stance, 28. Dupuis [Vaneigem], Cavalier History of and of the strength and pitfalls of the avant-garde Surrealism, 95–96. perspective, see Bolt Rasmussen, “Self-Murder of 29. The term “Gothic Marxism” is Margaret the Avant-Garde.” Cohen’s spin on Walter Benjamin’s analysis of 9. As the Situationist International put it in surrealism. See Cohen, Profane Illumination. 1958, “The goal of revolutionaries is the suppression Michael Löwy further developed the term in of politics (government by the people taking the Morning Star. place of the administration of things).” Situationist 30. For an analysis of the situationists in May ’68, International, “Collapse of the Revolutionary see Dumontier, Situationnistes et mai 68. Intellectuals.” 31. See the analysis of the importance of 10. Situationist International, “Bad Days Will “romantic anticapitalism” in May ’68 in Michael End.” Löwy’s introductory essay in this volume. 11. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 86. 32. The twelfth and final issue of Internationale 12. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 49. situationniste opened with an analysis of the 13. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 12–13. development in France titled “The Beginning of an 14. Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life, 138. Epoch.” 15. Debord, “Situationists and the New Forms,” 33. See Cusset, How the World Swung. 160. 34. See Fisher, Capitalist Realism. 16. For an analysis of the split, see Slater, 35. For his fall 2007 McQ campaign, fashion “Divided We Stand.” designer Alexander McQueen used photos from 17. Situationist International, “Meaning of Decay May and June 1968, displaying them in magazines in Art,” 93. such as Vogue and on large billboards in New York 18. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 89. and London.

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Berréby, Gérard. Textes et documents situationnistes, 1957–1960. Paris: Allia, 2004. Berréby, Gérard, and Raoul Vaneigem. Rien n’est fini: Tout commence. Paris: Allia, 2014. 140

Bolt Rasmussen, Mikkel. “The Self-Murder of the Avant-Garde.” In After the Great Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Art, Its Contradictions and Difficulties, 27–52. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018. ———. “The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics.” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 365–87. ———. “The Spectacle of de Gaulle’s Coup d’État: The Situationists on de Gaulle’s Coming to Power.” French Cultural Studies 27, no. 1 (2016): 96–110. Bourseiller, Christophe. Vie et mort de Guy Debord. Paris: Plon, 1999. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).” In Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 1–48. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Cusset, François. How the World Swung to the Right: Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions. Translated by Noura Wedell. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018. Debord, Guy. “Contribution to the Debate ‘Is Surrealism Dead or Alive?’” Translated by Tom McDonough. In Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, edited by Tom McDonough, 67–68. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. ———. “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency.” Translated by Tom McDonough. In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 29–50. ———. “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art.” Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 159–66. ———. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995. Dumontier, Pascal. Les situationnistes et mai 68: Théorie et pratique de la révolution (1966–1972). Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1990.

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Dupuis, Jules-François [Raoul Vaneigem]. A Cavalier History of Surrealism. 1977. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Edinburgh: AK Press, 1999. Duwa, Jérôme. Surréalistes et situationnistes: Vies parallèles. Paris: Éditions Dilecta, 2008. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books, 2009. King, Elliott. “Surrealism and Counterculture.” In A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, edited by David Hopkins, 416–30. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2016. Löwy, Michael. Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Perniola, Mario. I situazionisti: Il movimento cha ha profetizzato la “Società dello spettacolo.” Rome: Castelvecchi, 1998. Situationist International. “The Bad Days Will End.” Translated by Ken Knabb. Internationale situationniste, no. 7 (April 1962). https://​www​ .cddc​.vt​.edu​/sionline​/si​/baddays​.html. ———. “Collapse of the Revolutionary Intellectuals.” Translated by Reuben Keehan. Internationale situationniste, no. 2 (December 1958). https://​ www​.cddc​.vt​.edu​/sionline​/si​/collapse​.html. ———. “Editorial Notes: The Avant-Garde of Presence.” Translated by Tom McDonough. In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 137–52. ———. “Editorial Notes: The Meaning of Decay in Art.” Translated by Tom McDonough. In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 85–94. ———. “Suprême levée des défenseurs du surréalisme à Paris et revelation de leur valeur effective.” Internationale situationniste, no. 2 (December 1958): 32–34. Slater, Howard. “Divided We Stand: An Outline of Scandinavian Situationism.” Infopool, no. 4 (2001): 1–48. Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Seattle: Left Bank Books, 1983.

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Afrosurrealism as a Counterculture of Modernity Jonathan P. Eburne

8.

Q: What then is thought? A: Walking dangerously on tiptoe on the line of fire. —Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire, 1942

The term “avant-garde” bears explicit militaristic overtones. Yet the question of how artistic vanguards bear out the martial strategies implied in the name is a fraught one. Does “avant-garde” refer to a set of cultural maneuvers with distinctly political effects, or to experimental aesthetic practices whose political effects remain contestable? The answers, for the past two centuries, have tended to be yes and yes, though hardly without equivocation or debate. In spite of the term’s express appeal to forwardness and advancement, the movements and imperatives we tend to designate as avant-garde are often saddled with concerns about political consequence, an open-ended set of lateral, contingent demands that often look to the Left, and sometimes to the Right, as much as they look ahead. Beyond the question of what

an avant-garde is, it remains no less pressing to investigate what an avant-garde does: what it might be, or what it will have been. To this end, scholars and historians of radical aesthetic and political groups of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries often invoke past or future moments of historical rupture as the basis for their judgments of exigency: the traumatic aftermath of a recent war, for instance, or the utopian promise of a revolution to come. I thus propose two heuristics for reconsidering this historicity of avant-gardism within the framework of surrealism—a framework that invokes the relational poetics of experimental art and anticolonial insurgence alike, from Walter Benjamin’s notion of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century to the post- and neocolonial futures of global environmental and political turmoil that continue to hang in the balance. The first heuristic is to historicize avant-gardes as contemporary with the political violence

marked explicitly by colonialism and by the emergence of race as an “epidermic” set of political and cultural signifiers, a historical invention that takes the guise of a set of physiological properties. I invoke here Fred Moten’s notion that the avant-garde is “not only a temporal-historical concept”—that is, of newness, forwardness, or advance—“but a spatial-geographical concept as well.” The idea of the avant-garde is embedded, Moten argues, in a theory of history coincident with colonial modernity itself, which means that the ruptural insistences named as “avant-garde” emerge out of modernity’s specific conditions of possibility—namely, European and ultimately American settler colonialism and the legacies of chattel slavery. This is to say, as Moten writes, that “a particular geographical ideology, a geographical-racial or racist unconscious marks and is the problematic out of which or against the backdrop of which the idea of the avant-garde emerges.” Avant-gardism is the name for a surplus effect of this racist and racializing unconscious, the “social, aesthetic, political-economic, and theoretical” surplus of imperialism that can yield ruptural solidarities but that can just as easily resolve into fetishism and self-congratulatory assessments of “value” as well.1 Such violence discloses, moreover, an open series of militarized conflicts and imperial interventions whose contemporaneity is rarely far from apparent: the legacies and repercussions of colonialism and neocolonialism, imperial invasion, genocide, and the Middle Passage are as pervasive today, after all, as they were in 1680, in 1860, in 1900 and 1918, in 1954 or 1956, and throughout the 1960s and ’70s, albeit with varying degrees of ideological and experiential intensity. This essentially dialectical point has less to do with granting a kind of negative agency to colonial modernity in the production of modern artistic and literary experimentalism than with denoting the “insistent previousness” of racializing political formations and discourses within the very idea of an avant-garde.2 The term thus also bears implicit militaristic undertones, subtended by the histories of imperial and colonial violence that persist into the present of any such aesthetic engagement; this militarism likewise inflects the aesthetics of resistance, but in ways that are more complicated than merely a call to arms. The second heuristic is to think of avant-gardism as a fundamentally open-ended and thus contemporary set of investitures for this very reason. Rather than dating the birth pangs of experimental art to a singular origin—such as the aftermath of the Great War—its emergence as a surplus effect of this geographical-racial unconscious proposes an ongoing field of historical contestation to which the stakes of avant-garde work remain both immanent and not yet known. In this context, the study and practice of avant-garde art arrives with few overarching definitions about the political instrumentality of radical art or radical thought; it demands instead the suspension of any certainties one might seek in the success or failure of experimental art. Debates over the successes or failings of “experimental” art might thus be measured less according to immediate causal ties 143

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to political action or a definitive break with traditions of artistic or historical continuity than to its mediated emergence in the midst of what we might consider a state of perpetual (if discontinuous) historical crisis. The radicalism of poetry, visual art, film, theater, performance, music, and, increasingly, digital interactivity constitutes an imperative, we might say, rather than an inherent property: it points to an ambition—whether implicit or explicit—rather than an instrumentalizable result. Rather than presume the avant-garde to be either a reaction to the horrors of warfare (as is often the case in histories of Dada and surrealism, for instance) or a motive force for the coming insurrection, I propose that we attend to the immanent tactics of the experimental, which includes the extent to which, as Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, artists invent their own precursors. In short: avant-gardism does not denote a stable category of aesthetic or historical judgment, although attempts to define and theorize it in this way have often been made. Such radicalism offers no guarantees—and indeed, to the extent that such ambitions can be and have been explicitly self-applied, they are also subject to interrogation, suspicion, trivialization, and even outright dismissal. The oft-pronounced “death” of the avantgarde likewise has much to do with this kind of hindsight, the product of retro-analytical judgments of historical significance levied from the critical vantage point of, say, a more complacent public sphere or a more anemic intellectual environment. In suspending the categorical certainties of political efficacy, we can recognize instead the persistence of avant-garde activities throughout modernity and into the present, as “surplus” formations of its always-prior spatial-temporal imaginary. By doing so, paradoxically, we can also take heed of the insistent previousness of avant-garde activities themselves. Such “previousness” marks the tendency for there always to be an earlier instance of rupture, break, cut, shock, or innovation prior to the origin of any movement we might examine. It also marks the tendency of such priorities to be bound up in the very project of that movement, the wound of a past constitutive of its future. What is it that made Lautréamont, the Uruguayan poet who died in obscurity in 1870, so important for the surrealists? Why did surrealist poets, from André Breton to Aimé Césaire to Ted Joans, place so much stock in Rimbaud’s decision to abandon poetry and become a coffee and firearms dealer in Ethiopia? The modernity inhabited by the group founded in 1920s Paris extends anti- or ante-chronologically from the anarchist Belle Époque of Alfred Jarry to the revolution of Sade and even to the alembics of Nicolas Flamel—as well as into the present. It is with this double movement in mind that I wish to approach the immediate topic of this chapter, on Afrosurrealism as both an avant-garde and as what we might call, after Paul Gilroy and Zygmunt Bauman, a counterculture of modernity.3 I will begin, however, not with the origin of the term “Afrosurrealism”—which, as we will see, is already a kind of posthumous designation—but with an instance of its stammer, its reverberating The Right to Insubordination

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continuity. The majority of the artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers called Afrosurrealist do not necessarily inhabit the category that designates them as such. Much like the surrealist genealogies that occupy the pages of La revolution surréaliste and Breton’s manifestoes—“Sade is surrealist in sadism; Rimbaud is surrealist in the practice of life and elsewhere”4—Afrosurrealism designates a set of genealogies (partly invented and partly found) established according to an avant-garde priority. I mean priority here in two senses: first, as an exigency, a calling—that is, un appel—that gathers under its name the modes of expression orchestrated toward the contemporary practices of experimental poetry.5 The second sense designates an insistent previousness already implicit in this appel, which beckons toward the anteriority of any such contemporary disposition: that which is prior to its own nativity. The term “Afrosurrealist” is a neologism that has come to designate something other than a name for the participants in the surrealist movement who were Black, of African descent—though it hardly excludes them. Sometimes a genealogy, sometimes a tradition, sometimes an archive, Afrosurrealism is an anthologizing denomination that designates a surrealism that is Black or, rather, a surrealism for which race and racial politics form its constitutive priority. Unlike the surrealism of 1920s Paris or 1950s Mexico City or 1960s Prague or 1970s Chicago, it does not designate a formally self-constituting group or movement, but instead a peripatetic set of intellectual practices for which Afrosurrealism provides the name. It is a name, moreover, that is not necessarily a proper one. As film scholar Terri Francis has written, “Name a thing, watch it flee underground. What then is Afrosurrealism’s content? What does it create? It is itself partly invented and partly found.”6 Afrosurrealism does not presume an ontology, whether of “race” or, for that matter, of aesthetic categories. It is “partly invented and partly found” because the term is a critical invention rather than a formal manifestation, as we will see in what follows: it describes a set of priorities, activities, and tendencies that extend throughout modernity, both anterior and posterior to surrealism, bearing but also departing from the scar of racialization and the diasporizing effects of modernity. But it is also “partly invented and partly found” in the sense that it self-consciously marks an appeal to surrealism as a relational imperative: even the Black surrealists who participated directly in the surrealist movement, such as the Martiniquan poets associated with the journal Légitime defense, who participated in anticolonial activities in Paris in 1931–32, were leftist before they were surrealist. For Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, writing in the journal Tropiques during World War II, surrealism offered a “miraculous weapon,” a supplement to their arsenal of ideological and imaginative armaments.7 As Suzanne Césaire wrote in 1943, “Surrealism has given us some of our possibilities. It is up to us to find the others.”8 Other artists and intellectuals of the diaspora have tended to concur. For the young Haitian poets associated with the journal La Ruche in 1946, André Breton’s visit to Haiti 145

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was a spur to revolutionary action, but one that was recognized through affinity rather than, say, “influence” or formal affiliation. As René Depestre, the editor of La Ruche, later wrote, the poets that broke with surrealism in the name of Communist militancy—such as Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon in particular—were as important to his thinking as any formal allegiance with the Bretonian movement. Depestre and other Haitian poets first learned about surrealism from Aimé Césaire, who visited Port-au-Prince in 1944, the year before Breton visited the island: surrealism was already mediated though diasporic affinities. Such an open genealogy was fundamental, in turn, to Depestre’s evaluation of the movement itself. For Depestre, surrealism, like negritude, was useful insofar as it designated an ongoing “movement,” that is, an open process, rather than a static concept.9 Partly found, and partly invented: surrealism offers a medium, an open set of relations that comprise not a filiation from surrealism—an extraction from it or a lineage with it—but instead a terrain for marronage, a “discrepant engagement” or, as Edouard Glissant has put it, an errance, a “forever conjectural” derangement of memory that “consists always of going deeper into the mystery of the root, shaded with variations of errantry.”10 The overlapping but also discontinuous genealogies of Afrosurrealism are laid out in three principal anthologies, a medium that is significant in itself. The most recent of these anthologies is Terri Francis’s 2013 contribution to Black Camera, a special section of the scholarly journal dedicated to Afrosurrealist film. The issue features a 2009 essay by D. Scot Miller called “Afrosurreal Manifesto,” itself something of an anthology or bilan in the spirit of Breton’s litany of names in the “Manifesto of Surrealism.” Both Miller’s text and Francis’s special issue are concerned with describing a set of emergent tendencies in contemporary African American art, including film, performance, poetry, fiction, music, and visual culture. The second compilation is the Black, Brown, and Beige anthology, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley and published in 2009, which is framed more explicitly as a surrealist anthology published by members of the Chicago Surrealist Group. Titled after Duke Ellington’s 1943 jazz symphony, the anthology also alludes to the “new” French tricolor of “Black, Blanc, Beur.” Both anthologies—Francis’s Black Camera “Close-Up” and the Black, Brown, and Beige volume—are compiled from the perspective of the contemporary United States, as is the third, slightly older genealogical assemblage, which I address below. Both anthologies are also decidedly transnational in scope, with the Black, Brown, and Beige anthology explicitly assembling “surrealist writings from Africa and the diaspora,” fusing anglophone, francophone, and arabaphone work by writers and artists of color. Such assemblages, I repeat, do not necessarily represent categories to which the artists, writers, and filmmakers included consider themselves as “belonging.” As Francis writes, “Neither surrealism nor Afrosurrealism is a style, a set of criteria, an ideology, a genre, or even a coherent exploration. It is not a movement. It is [instead] an imaginary, magnetizing loosely related The Right to Insubordination

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sensibilities, and it certainly is a modernism connected to other forms of modernism such as the Harlem Renaissance, negritude, magical realism, and what Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis called marvelous realism.”11 The Black, Brown, and Beige anthology presents a somewhat more taxonomic and revisionist undertaking, seeking to redefine “surrealism” itself as a global and diasporic movement, rather than a movement centered largely in Paris. Its position is thus a polemical one: as the editors write, “in the vast critical literature on surrealism, all but a few black surrealists have been invisible. Despite mounting studies of Aimé Césaire, Wilfredo Lam, Ted Joans, and, more recently, Jayne Cortez, academic histories and anthologies typically, but very wrongly, persist in conveying surrealism as an all-white movement, like other ‘artistic schools’ of European origin.” In glaring contrast to the tokenism of traditional surrealist scholarship, international surrealist publications “regularly feature texts and reproductions of works by black comrades from Martinique, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, South America, Africa, the United States, and other lands.”12 Black, Brown, and Beige does not restrict its purview, however, to “direct” contacts or formal affiliations with the surrealist movement; instead, its work strives, as Francis says of her scholarly survey, “to re-center blackness at the core of surrealism and modernism, not as catalytic matter but as the manifestations of black artists’ own modalities. Black artistic practice ignited the European avant-garde. And, as [Jacques Stephen] Alexis and [Suzanne] Césaire demonstrate, surrealism offered diasporic artists a dynamic conceptual space in which to talk about a ‘redemptive politics’ and to imagine freedom in this life now, concretely.”13 The genealogical imperative of such projects thus extends to an open set of political and aesthetic solidarities across the diaspora, magnetized not only by the trenchant histories of colonial racialization and anticolonial struggle but also by the ever-resurgent priority for liberatory politics in the present. Such anthologies have inspired or at least animated a number of recent art exhibitions and events in turn, including a 2013 symposium in New York titled “Get Ready for the Marvelous: Black Surrealism in Dakar, Fort-de-France, Havana, Johannesburg, New York City, Paris, Port-au-Prince, 1932–2013.” Organized by curator Adrienne Edwards, the symposium was a lead-up to Performa 13, a biennial series of one hundred performance-art events organized around the historical impact of the surrealist movement. The Performa 13 exploration of Black surrealism featured a three-part performance by Derrick Adams titled The Institution of Me, Featuring Experimental Posthumous Conversations with Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), the Martiniquan Folk Artist Robert St. Rose (Who Proposed to Voyage into Space Using the Poetry of Aimé Césaire), and the Nigerian Bandleader and Political Figure Fela Kuti (1938–1997). Of the three figures, one is at least partly invented: Robert St. Rose is the subject of the 2008 film Zétwal, by the Paris-based Martiniquan multimedia artist Gilles Elie-Dit-Cosaque, which documents the story of 147

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St. Rose’s poetic flight. St. Rose allegedly disappeared in 1974 after striving to become the first Martiniquan in space. His home-built rocket was, the film claims, to be powered by the poetry of Césaire. Like Adams’s performance, Elie-Dit-Cosaque’s Zétwal and its subject form part of a broader genealogy of “Afronauts,” figurations of Black astronauts from Africa and the diaspora that take their cue from Edward Makuka Nkoloso’s 1964 effort to launch a Zambian space program. The prospect of launching a homemade rocket into space was ridiculed by the international press during the Cold War years as a symptom of African underdevelopment; for this very reason, the Afronaut has since become a touchstone for politically charged artistic reimaginings in the work of artists such as Yinka Shonibare, Cristina de Middel, Frances Bodomo, Kiluanji Kia Henda, and others.14 Organized explicitly in response to the Black, Brown, and Beige anthology and featuring Robin D. G. Kelley as a featured speaker, the “Get Ready for the Marvelous” symposium showed films such as Zétwal and featured an artist’s talk by Simone Leigh and a commissioned performance by Adam Pendleton, best known for his Black Dada series, in honor of playwright Adrienne Kennedy.15 That same year, Columbia College in Chicago hosted an exhibition titled Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire, Revisited that featured ten emerging Chicago-based artists of color under the aegis of Afrosurrealism; the show was a reprise of an earlier exhibition by the same name sponsored by the Chicago Surrealist Group in 1976.16 Curated by the artist Alexandria Eregbu, then an undergraduate student at the college, the exhibition sought, Eregbu wrote, to embrace “the present moment, the right now—seeking urgency and calling attention to the insanity of being (physically and mentally) present as a person of color amidst the skewed perception of a supposed post-race nation.”17 As Eregbu suggested, the resonance of such work has to do with its genealogical overlap with Afrofuturism, a similarly emergent category for describing Black technophilic and sci-fi cultural production from around the diaspora, which extends to hip-hop, comics, film, and other experimental forms. Drawing from both aesthetic tendencies, Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire, Revisited embraced “the ‘animorph’ and encourages hybridity by pushing re-appropriation and new methods of critical thinking,” Eregbu wrote, referencing both a popular fantasy literature series and the figural economy of contemporary artists such as Wangechi Mutu, Jane Alexander, and Chris Ofili. D. Scot Miller, however, categorically distinguishes Afrosurrealism from Afrofuturism in his “Afrosurreal Manifesto” on the basis of the varying intensities of their investments in the contemporary: Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. Afrosurrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration The Right to Insubordination

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camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afrosurrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.

Afrosurrealists expose this from a “future-past” called right now.



right now, Barack Hussein Obama is America’s first black president.



right now, Afrosurreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists,

and the unexpected turns this “browning” of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced.18

For Miller, the particularity of Afrosurrealism lies in its mobilization of the Black radical tradition toward a site-specific political present. The site specificity of Miller’s “Afrosurreal Manifesto” is no less particular: the manifesto was first published in the San Francisco Bay area, most notably in a 2009 issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and it correspondingly celebrates San Francisco as a key site in the emergence of Afrosurrealism.19 Even so, his genealogy radiates outward in space and time from this nodal point: “San Francisco, the land of Afrosurreal poet laureate Bob Kaufman, can be at the forefront in creating an emerging aesthetic. In this land of buzzwords and catch phrases, Afrosurreal is necessary to transform how we see things now, how we look at what happened then, and what we can expect to see in the future.”20 It’s no more coincidental that Kool Keith (as Dr. Octagon) recorded the 1996 Afrosurreal anthem “Blue Flowers” on Hyde Street, or that Samuel R. Delany based much of his 1974 Afrosurreal urtext Dhalgren on experiences in San Francisco. “An Afrosurreal aesthetic addresses these lost legacies and reclaims the souls of our cities, from Kehinde Wiley painting the invisible men (and their invisible motives) in NYC to Yinka Shonibare beheading seventeenth-century (and twenty-first-century) sexual tourists of Europe. From Nick Cave’s soundsuits at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to the words you are reading right now, the message is clear: San Francisco, the world is ready for an Afrosurreal art movement.” As the spatial complement to its genealogical priority, Afrosurrealism is itself a diasporic aesthetic, relocatable as much in space as in historical time. And this variability defines, in turn, its counterdefinitional aesthetics. “Afrosurrealists,” Miller writes, “strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical. We turn to Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, and Ghostface Killa. We look to Kehinde Wiley, whose observation about the Black male body applies to all art and culture: ‘There is no objective image. And there is no way to objectively view the image itself.’”21 As multifarious as such litanies may sound, I want to stress that the genealogical imperative is itself an immanent technology of Afrosurrealism, a constitutive—but also operative—function of its cultural work as an avant-garde. Why such genealogies? To quote Paul Gilroy, they point specifically to the formation of a “community of needs and 149

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solidarity which is magically made audible” in the cultural productions they designate.22 It is a virtual rather than a formally constituted community of taste. Borges’s notion that artists invent their own precursors returns here, in the sense that what is invented is not the actual figures—the precursors—but a set of relations with them. What unites this community of taste is, I propose, a taste for thought rather than for an aesthetic or political intentionality grounded in identificatory terms or an ontology of race. In other words, the recourse to ontology often ascribed to the “Afro”—and ontology of race, of Blackness—presumes in Afrosurrealism not a mythologized essentialism but a political and imaginative entanglement with the “racist unconscious” itself. It names, in Nathaniel Mackey’s words, a “discrepant engagement” with ontology and history alike, in their aesthetic and political modalities, as a medium for thought, a medium for the thinkable.23 As Michelle Wright has written, it is important to underscore that the histories of “race” consist not so much of histories as of epistemologies: “narratives of knowledge that are taught, learned, relayed, exchanged, and debated in discussions on the ‘facts’ of Blackness,” as Wright puts it.24 Like its speculative counterpart in Afrofuturism, Afrosurrealism designates the speculative as well as the material, political, ideological, and social disentanglement and rearticulation of such narratives of knowledge. “Blackness,” no less than the idea of an avant-garde, is a surplus formation of colonial modernity, the epidermalization of political relations of domination. Afrosurrealism bears, but also rewrites and rethinks, the scar of this violent historical logic—refusing its erasure. Thought, in this context, becomes the work of gathering—gathering anew, bringing into relation—such epistemologies. As a name for such an imperative to gather, Afrosurrealism thus beckons to what Sun Ra called an “alter-history” that recasts as epistemology the very history of modernity from which it diverges; it also opens up the past, future, and present “real” of this alter-history as a medium for imaginative and political struggle. As Moten puts it, radical Black aesthetics is “an erotics of the cut, submerged in the broken, breaking space-time of an improvisation. Blurred, dying life; liberatory, improvisatory, damaged love; freedom drive.”25 This is not a formula for political instrumentality; it is instead an inventive (and partially found) assemblage that resonates with political possibility by refusing the erasure of memory, by refusing the easy instrumentalization of the ready-at-hand. There is a melancholic insistence in the freedom drive of Afrosurrealism, an elegiac component that nonetheless voices the call of its political ambitions. The term “Afrosurreal” itself derives from an earlier anthology, the third of the three mentioned above. This anthology takes the form of a 1988 special issue of Black American Literature Forum (now African American Review) on the writer Henry Dumas, whose own work notably addresses the haunted resonances of Black expression as precisely such a gathering, a calling-into-relation. The special issue is a memorial one, marking the The Right to Insubordination

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twentieth anniversary of Dumas’s death; Dumas was killed by a white police officer in the New York subway in 1968—a fact hauntingly resonant today in an epoch of heightened police violence against African Americans. In turn, the “presentist” thrust of D. Scot Miller’s Afrosurrealist manifesto in 2009 resounds with the secondary echo of the gunshots that brought down Henry Dumas and spawned Amiri Baraka’s memorial term “Afro-Surrealist Expressionism” to describe his work posthumously. Such historical reverberations are constitutive of Baraka’s coinage of “Afro-Surrealist Expressionism,” which plumbs the deep historicity of such violence, itself anticipated in Dumas’s writing. In “Ark of Bones,” the title story in Dumas’s posthumously published short story collection, two African American southerners, Fish-hound and Headeye, conjure a “soul boat,” a massive ship that materializes on the Mississippi River, full of bones. On board this ark of bones, an old man explains, “Son, you are in the house of generations. Every African who lives in America has part of his soul in this ark. God has called you and I shall assist you.”26 Writing about Dumas’s story in 1988, Baraka transforms the fictional ark into a vessel for a genealogy of Afrosurreal expressionism. “The world of Ark of Bones,” he writes, “shares a black mythological lyricism, strange yet ethnically familiar! Africa, the southern U.S., black life and custom are motif, mood and light, rhythm, and implied history. Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison, and Henry Dumas are the giants of this genre of African American literary Afro-Surreal Expressionism. Jacob Lawrence, Vincent Smith, and Romare Bearden are similar in painting; Duke, Monk, Trane, Sun Ra in music. Dumas, despite his mythological elegance and deep signification, was part of the wave of African American writers at the forefront of the ’60s Black Arts Movement.”27 The notion of ethnic familiarity that Baraka invokes here refers, as I have argued, not to some essentializing core of Blackness or “Black soul” that often characterizes the metaphysical appropriation of negritude and other pan-Africanisms, but instead to the priority of modernity itself in its spatial-geographical operations of slavery and colonialism. Black life and custom are “motif, mood and light, rhythm, and implied history” that bear the impression of the Middle Passage and date their errantry from, and through, its historical scar. It is a scar that persists in and through the present, a prior insistence that demands reckoning. Baraka uses the term “surreal,” too, in a loose enough way, much as his famous early poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” invoked the Dada movement: not, that is, as an invocation of the surrealist movement founded by André Breton in Paris in the 1920s and articulated through a series of manifestoes, but as the name for an aesthetics of strangeness that uses a “language of exquisite metaphorical elegance” that could signify as powerfully as it could directly communicate: “the symbols sing,” Baraka explains, and “are cymbals of deeper experience, not word games for academics.” The poetic appeal of, and to, 151

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“deeper experience” is “surreal” to the extent that it invokes the wrenching priority of historical violence from which the poetry of Hurston, Morrison, Coltrane, Monk, and Dumas draws its revelatory beauty and its political charge alike. Baraka describes how “the very broken quality, almost to abstraction, is a function of change and transition. It is as though the whole world we inhabit rests on the bottom of the ocean, harnessed by memory, language, image to that ‘railroad of human bones’ at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”28 The insistent previousness of Baraka’s genealogy calls to living writers and artists in the memory of the murdered Henry Dumas; it also calls to the priority of the Middle Passage as the arch-ontic condition for any such avant-garde formation. From a railroad of human bones, Dumas composed an ark—a means of conveyance, if not of deliverance, built from the same archive of sorrow. Baraka’s “anthology” outlines a specifically African American genealogy for “Afro-Surreal Expressionism.” And it is through genealogies—the work of gathering, of partial invention and partial finding—that Afrosurrealism persists. Francis’s journal issue, Miller’s manifesto, Edwards’s symposium, Eregbu’s exhibition, and Rosemont and Kelley’s anthology—each expands Baraka’s genealogy to include the historical as well as virtual points of contact between iterations of the surrealist movement and the African American and diasporic artists whose work falls under the category of “Afrosurrealism.” The geography of Black, Brown, and Beige is especially extensive in scope, tracing continental African surrealisms as well as Afro-Caribbean and African American writers, musicians, and artists, though it remains incomplete insofar as the field itself continues to shift and expand.29 The point, however, is not to propose geographical completeness, any more than it is to ascribe a singular racial or aesthetic origin. The African American genealogy of largely post-1960s artists, the emergent contemporary genealogy of diasporic artists, and the more francophone genealogy of interwar and midcentury artists are anything but incompatible, precisely insofar as they refuse to adhere to a singular lineage or filial inheritance tied to European surrealism. The operative specificity of Afrosurrealism lies, on the contrary, in naming a priority that comprehends rather than follows European surrealism, appealing to the forms and fissures—one might even say the “traditions”—of Black experimental art throughout modernity. Such an optic ultimately recognizes, in turn, the provocation of European surrealism’s own genealogical imperative, its own “ark of bones.” For at the sites of surrealism’s originary call to revolution in the early 1920s we find the consistent priority of the impressions it bears: not only of Dada and anarchism but also of Roussel, Jarry, Sade, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and so forth. I thus propose that we invert (or abandon entirely) the canonicity of surrealism as a post–World War I Parisian movement that eventually “spread” to the colonies, and that we invoke instead its enduring priorities in the ongoing wars and insurrections of European colonialism. In approaching surrealism The Right to Insubordination

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through the genealogies of Afrosurrealism, we see not a “legacy” of French modernism but a movement whose intellectual and political coordinates make up the discontinuous surplus effects of the violence of modernity. We see this in the group’s response to the Communist question of 1925 and 1926, which was itself a response to Abd-el-Krim’s anticolonial insurgency in Morocco; we see it in the communism-related “rupture” of 1929–31, which yielded a series of “dissident Surrealisms” along with Breton’s “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”; we see it in the anticolonial imperatives of the early 1930s, thanks to the “discrepant engagement” of Caribbean intellectuals in Paris. My point here is not only to heed the many discontinuities within the history of the avant-garde but also to propose that the history of surrealism, and the history of modernism more broadly, be likewise recast in terms of such discrepant engagements. “Afrosurrealism” names such discontinuities from a retro-analytic position, disclosing the impression of colonial subjectivity within so-called orthodox surrealism and naming a proliferating series of genealogies compiled in its name. The “counterculture” designated by such genealogies outlines both an open “tradition” of diasporic artists and intellectuals and the speculative realm aggregated by this tradition; it involves both a counterhistoriography and an implicit but as yet unknowable futurity (hence the discontinuity of Afrosurrealism and Afrofuturism: Afrosurrealism gives imaginative form to such alternative futures). But, as I’ve suggested, these modalities constitute a medium for intervention rather than constituting the “beyond” or rupture itself. We are dealing not with a concept of “the event” or a formula for either revolutionary action or political subjectivity but a set of genealogies that appeal to the discontinuous aesthetic and political modalities of priority. Afrosurrealism, as a counterculture of modernity, names a virtual community of thought assembled by and through this medium, a poetics of relation, a speculative descent into the abyss of history that “deranges memory” even as it gathers up its remains. By “counterculture of modernity,” I thus delineate not a dialectical negation or consequence of modernity but its immanent surplus, whose capacity for either fetishization or discontinuity remains hauntingly open, unresolved. Paul Gilroy’s notion of a counterculture of modernity is especially informative in this light. For whereas Zygmunt Bauman’s Habermasian proposal that the Left redefine itself as a “counter-culture of modernity” seems a model for leftist politics that upholds the “values” of democracy and human rights that have been systematically eroded by capitalism, Gilroy invokes the more defiant resonances of the term. For Gilroy, it points specifically to the formation of a community of needs and solidarity which is magically made audible in the music itself and palpable in the social relations of its cultural utility and reproduction. . . . The willfully damaged signs which betray the resolutely utopian politics of transformation therefore 153

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partially transcend modernity, constructing both an imaginary anti-modern past and a postmodern yet-to-come. This is not a counter-discourse but a counterculture that defiantly reconstructs its own critical, intellectual, and moral genealogy in a partially hidden public sphere of its own. The politics of transfiguration therefore reveals the hidden internal fissures in the concept of modernity. The bounds of politics are extended precisely because this tradition of expression refuses to accept that the political is a readily separable domain.30

Afrosurrealism is not a counterculture in the sense that its terms are defined by the dominant culture it resists; rather, as the embodied, damaged surplus of this dom-

inant culture, it names and appeals to a “partially hidden public sphere” within the very fissures. Yet whereas Gilroy stresses the actuality of such a public sphere in the transnational exchanges and cultures of the Black Atlantic, Afrosurrealism designates, as I have suggested, a virtual rather than a necessarily self-constituting community of thought, its existence subject to the very speculative and associative modalities it names. Immanent within its own genealogies, the certainty of Afrosurrealism itself is, like its political imperatives, suspended. As René Depestre recognized, what is valuable as a form of revolt cannot become reified as a concept or “position”—or an ontology or an “identity”—but must instead remain vigilant in the face of modernity’s ongoing forms of racial warfare. In this sense, Afrosurrealism denominates a genealogical movement that cuts and augments the primal in order to remain open to the persistent demands of its community of needs.

Notes

1. Moten, In the Break, 40, 30, 31. 2. The notion of “an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion” is from Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook, 42. See also Moten, In the Break, 258–59. 3. Bauman, “Left as a Counter-Culture.” See also the first chapter of Gilroy, Black Atlantic. 4. Breton, “Manifeste du surréalisme” (1924), in Oeuvres complètes, 329. 5. Ibid., 328. 6. Francis, “Close-Up: Afrosurrealism,” 109. 7. See Césaire, Armes miraculeuses. 8. Césaire, “Malaise of a Civilization,” 33. 9. See Depestre, “André Breton en Haïti,” 234. 10. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 21. 11. Francis, “Close-Up: Afrosurrealism,” 97. 12. Rosemont and Kelley, “Introduction: Invisible Surrealists,” in Black, Brown, and Beige, 1. 13. Francis, “Close-Up: Afrosurrealism,” 100. 14. On Derrick Adams, see Goldberg, Performa 13, 331–34; see also the artist’s website at http://​www​ The Right to Insubordination

.derrickadams‌.com. On Afronauts and Afrofuturist literature and art, see esp. Armillas-Tiseyra, “Afronauts”; Commander, “Space for Race”; and Wilson, “Afronaut and Retrofuturism.” 15. See Goldberg, Performa 13, 175–79. On Simone Leigh and surrealism, see Leigh, Ganesh, and McMillan, “Alternative Structures.” 16. See the exhibition’s page on Columbia College, Chicago’s, website, accessed August 31, 2021: http://​students​.colum​.edu​/deps​/the​-arcade​ /exhibitions​/marvelous​-freedom​/index​.php. 17. See http://​www​.alexandriaeregbu​.com​/du​ -monde​-noir. 18. Miller, “Afrosurreal Manifesto,” 114. 19. See http://​thisisafrosurreal​.tumblr​.com. 20. Francis, “Close-Up: Afrosurrealism,” 115. 21. Miller, “Afrosurreal Manifesto,” 115, 116. 22. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 37. 23. See Mackey, Discrepant Engagement. 24. Wright, Physics of Blackness, 8. 25. Moten, In the Break, 26. 154

26. Dumas, “Ark of Bones,” in Echo Tree, 20. 27. Baraka, “Henry Dumas,” 164. 28. Ibid., 164, 165, 166. 29. In 2017, Rochelle Spencer founded the Afrosurreal Writers Workshop, which “amplifies the voices of emerging and established writers and artists of color who create surreal, futurist, speculative fiction, fantasy, science fiction, horror, dystopian, apocalyptic, weird, or absurdist literature and art, centered in perspectives of people of color.” See “About: Mission and Board,” Afrosurreal

Bibliography

Writers website, accessed August 31, 2021, https:// afrosurrealwriters.wordpress.com/about. See also Spencer’s recent study Afrosurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction. On continental African surrealisms, see, for instance, Bardouil, Surrealism in Egypt. See also D. Scot Miller’s , “Afrosurreal: The Marvelous and the Invisible 2016,” Open Space, October 4, 2016, https://​openspace​.sfmoma​.org​ /2016​/10​/afrosurreal​-the​-marvelous​-and​-the​ -invisible. 30. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 37–38.

Armillas-Tiseyra, Magalí. “Afronauts: On Science Fiction and the Crisis of Possibility.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3, no. 3 (2016): 273–90. Baraka, Amiri. “Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist.” In “Henry Dumas Issue,” edited by Eugene B. Redmond, special issue, Black American Literature Forum 22, no. 2 (1988): 164–66. Bardouil, Sam. Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group. London: I. B. Tauris, 2017. Bauman, Zygmunt. “The Left as a Counter-Culture of Modernity.” Telos 70 (December 21, 1986): 81–93. Breton, André. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 1. Edited by Marguerite Bonnet. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. Césaire, Aimé. Les armes miraculeuses. Paris: Gallimard, 1946. Césaire, Suzanne. “Malaise of a Civilization.” In The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945), edited by Daniel Maximin and translated by Keith L. Walker, 28–33. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Commander, Michelle. “The Space for Race: Black American Exile and the Rise of AfroSpeculation.” ASAP/Journal 1, no. 3 (2016): 409–37. Depestre, René. “André Breton en Haïti.” In Bonjour et adieu à la négritude, 227–35. Paris: Seghers, 1980. Dumas, Henry. Echo Tree. Edited by Eugene B. Redmond. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2003. Francis, Terri. “Close-Up: Afrosurrealism; Introduction: The No-Theory Chant of Afrosurrealism.” Black Camera 5, no. 1 (2013): 95–112. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Glissant, Edouard. The Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Goldberg, RoseLee. Performa 13: Surrealism, the Voice, Citizenship. New York: Performa, 2015. Leigh, Simone, Chitra Ganesh, and Uri McMillan. “Alternative Structures: Aesthetics, Imagination, and Radical Reciprocity; An Interview with GIRL.” ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (2017): 241–52. Mackey, Nathaniel. Bedouin Hornbook. San Francisco: Sun and Moon Press, 1997. ———. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, CrossCulturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Miller, D. Scot. “Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black Is the New Black—A 21st-Century Manifesto.” Black Camera 5, no. 1 (2013): 113–17. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Rosemont, Franklin, and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds. Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Spencer, Rochelle. Afrosurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction. London: Routledge, 2020. ———. “Why Black Science Fiction Studies Matter.” Black Girl Nerds, August 20, 2015. https://​ www​.academia​.edu​/24844424​/Why​_Black​ _Science​_Fiction​_Studies​_Matter. Wilson, Paul. “The Afronaut and Retrofuturism in Africa.” ASAP/Journal 4, no. 1 (2019): 139–66. Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

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The Surrealist Adventure and the Poetry of Direct Action

Passionate Encounters Between the Chicago Surrealist Group, the Wobblies, and Earth First! Ron Sakolsky

9.

Automatism, in painting as in everything else, is a form of direct action, above and beyond “law” and “technique.”

—Franklin Rosemont, Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous (2003)

The Wobbly-Surrealist Axis First established in the political ferment of the sixties, the Chicago Surrealist Group has been practically the opposite of an artistic or literary school. Rather, and uniquely, it has combined elements of a highly mobile potlatch festival, the old-time Wobbly “flying squadron,” and an anarchist affinity group. Its early history is deeply connected to the radical unionism of the Industrial Workers of the

World. The Wobbly emphasis on direct action, imagination, creativity, improvisation, humor, and its hobo heritage was mirrored in the surrealist-based activism of Franklin and Penelope Rosemont and their Chicago cohorts. To Franklin, the Wobblies resembled the “free associations of artists, poets, musicians and other creative dreamers” more than traditional revolutionary parties or trade unions.1 The Roosevelt University Wobbly chapter, founded by Franklin and Penelope during their sporadic college days, and the Solidarity Bookshop and a Windy City publication known as the Rebel Worker were the precursors of the Chicago Surrealist Group. Because surrealism was always a constant in all of these endeavors, the activist history of the Chicago Surrealist Group was bathed in an incendiary brew of radical art and politics right from the start. The Roosevelt University Wobbly Club was the first student group anywhere to be affiliated with the unruly radicalism of the IWW. As a Wobbly chapter, its career was

short but sensational. When African American anarcho-pacifist poet Joffre Stewart gave a talk there, he burned a US flag, as was his custom. The student club was promptly suspended by the university administration. The flag burning and suspension made headlines, but the “Wobblies-in-Exile” (as the suspended group called itself) held protests in Grant Park and coordinated a well-publicized free-speech fight that won the support not only of most students but also of a large part of the faculty. The struggle, brought to national attention by anarchist writer Paul Goodman and others, ended in the group’s reinstatement and was written up in the New Left press. A few months later, the Berkeley free speech movement made national headlines. The original Wobblies, of course, had themselves been involved in free-speech fights on many occasions in the early part of the twentieth century. As Franklin saw it, his focus as a Wobbly organizer was to revitalize the IWW to help restore it to its historic role as a vehicle for exuberant direct action. Consequently, in 1964, he started a new IWW journal in Chicago, the Rebel Worker (seven issues, 1964–67). What distinguished the Rebel Worker from mainstream leftist union publications was a passional attraction to the “practice of poetry” in assisting the imaginary to become real. Franklin remembered the Rebel Worker days as being “undisciplined and playful to a degree that surely seemed carnivalesque to our critics,” adding, “we dreamed of the wonders of revolutionary thought and action free of the shackles of all hand-me-down ideologies. While others patiently published platforms, programs and policy statements, we rushed into print with our wildest dreams and desires.”2 Over the years, some wags have claimed that the initials IWW actually stand for “I Won’t Work,” and part of the appeal of the union to the budding surrealists was that, for the Wobblies, the refusal of work had a much more radical foundation than did the cynical hipster stance often associated with the Beats. As Franklin put it in his reminiscence of those years in Dancin’ in the Streets (2005), “Our aims were simple: We wanted to abolish wage-slavery and to smash the State—that is, to make total revolution, and to have lots of fun—really live it up—in a new and truly free society. We called ourselves anarchists, or Surrealists—or Wobblies. . . . What excited us were the limitless possibilities of the free imagination in conditions of playful anarchy.”3 Not wanting to get bogged down in sectarian ideology, the Rebel Worker did not see surrealism and anarchism as antithetical but, in a surrealist sense, as potentially “communicating vessels.” The Rebel Worker published reprints of writings by André Breton, René Daumel, Benjamin Perét, and Leonora Carrington and selected tracts by the surrealist group in Paris, alongside the writings of young Wobs and more seasoned Wobbly organizers, sages, and hobo philosophers. One of the latter Wobbly agitators was boxcar-riding poet and verbal alchemist T-Bone Slim. Franklin, in his later years, collected T-Bone’s poetically playful ramblings in book form under the aegis of “vernacular 157

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surrealism,” noting that his writing “often approaches the method systematized by the first generation of surrealists under the name ‘psychic automatism.’”4 It should come as no surprise, then, that at the 1976 Chicago surrealists’ massive World Surrealist Exhibition, Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire, which opened on May Day of 1976 at their very own low-rent Gallery Black Swan, the Chicago Surrealist Group would include among its “Eleven Domains of Surrealist Vigilance” one named for T-Bone Slim. Franklin considered himself a “thoroughgoing Wobbly” until the day he died in 2009. Aside from the Haymarket Scrapbook, a major collection of pre-Wobbly radical labor material relating to the Haymarket uprising of 1886, which he coedited with Dave Roediger, a large part of his work as a grassroots labor historian stemmed from his early embrace of Haymarket anarchism and his experience of a still surviving Wobbly hobohemian culture. His “Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons,” appended to the expanded edition of Joyce Kornbluh’s Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, is one of the very few detailed studies of radical labor iconography. In pioneering the process of intermedia experimentation by means of connecting Wobbly visual art to IWW songwriting, Ernest Riebe’s politically clueless cartoon character Mr. Block inspired one of singing Wobbly organizer Joe Hill’s most popular songs, for which the blockheaded one is name-checked in the title. Franklin eventually did a full-length study of Hill himself, which discussed for the first time anywhere the Wobbly bard’s contributions to labor cartooning and wilderness radicalism, while also uncovering the IWW’s subliminal relationship to surrealism. In 1997, Franklin produced a volume of the “selected ravings” of Slim Brundage, the Wobbly founder and janitor of the Dada-esque College of Complexes, a.k.a. “the playground for people who think” and “Chicago’s Number One Beatnik Bistro.” Brundage himself was a rare living link between the older radical working-class intellectual community of the North Side’s IWW, Bughouse Square, Dil Pickle Club soapboxing nexus and their Beat generation, and New Left countercultural successors. As for Solidarity, because of its welcoming atmosphere, the bookshop became a hangout for the young rebels of the Louis Lingg Memorial Chapter of SDS and the Anarchist Horde, both of which played a significant role in the Chicago anti–Vietnam War protest movement. Clearly, surrealism in the United States was steeped in anarchism, and anarchist theory and practice provided much of the revolutionary ardor that has characterized “Chicago Idea” surrealism from the very beginning. Several members of the original band of Windy City surrealists were active as anarchists long before they encountered surrealism. Anarcho-pacifist Tor Faegre did jail time for his part in the Committee for Non-Violent Action campaign against nuclear submarines. Bernard Marszalek, who considered himself a Bakuninist, had been the Chicago rep for the British-based Anarchy magazine. Robert Green was an energetic civil rights and antiwar activist. And The Right to Insubordination

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when “blues as poetry” aficionado Paul Garon chanced to walk through the door of the Solidarity Bookshop one day, and responded affirmatively to Penelope’s inquiry about where she might find the elusive records of bluesman Peetie Wheatstraw (alternately known as both “the Devil’s Son-in-Law” and “the High Sheriff from Hell”), the Chicago Surrealist Group discovered a comrade for life. From 1964 through 1968, the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop group, the Anarchist Horde, and the “Left Wing of the Beat Generation” were more or less synonymous. Most of these people also considered themselves surrealists, or were at least strongly “under the influence.” The Rebel Worker surrealists also took part in the Chicago-based Student Peace Union, the largest New Left group before the heyday of SDS. Far from isolating them from larger struggles, the Rebel Worker group’s extremism found wide support. Their contingents in major antiwar marches, under the IWW’s huge red banner and a bevy of black flags, were among the largest, loudest, and most youthful. They were a radicalizing force that helped make the New Left newer and stronger as it moved from reform to revolution. Between 1966 and 1968, the Chicago surrealists could be reached in care of Solidarity Bookshop. Solidarity was also the mailing address and general headquarters of Black Swan Press / Surrealist Editions, the publishing imprints of the Chicago Surrealist Group and the Surrealist Movement in the United States. Since 1967, almost every participant in Chicago surrealism has published under the sign of Lautréamont’s black swan: in books, pamphlets, the Surrealist Research and Development Monograph series, and, of course, Arsenal. In 1970, the journal Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion appeared as a fully surrealist successor to the Rebel Worker. Like other Black Swan imprints, Arsenal was produced with typographical excellence, a distinctive design, and a special tone of its own—qualities then all too rare in leftist publications in the United States. Edited by Franklin, with an editorial board consisting of Paul Garon, Joseph Jablonski, Philip Lamantia, and Penelope Rosemont, Arsenal became US surrealism’s journal of research and discovery.

Workers of the World, Be Wild! In his poem “Only the Drums Remembered,” legendary IWW bard and graphic artist Ralph Chaplin, author of the anthemic class struggle song “Solidarity Forever,” expressed his sadness and anger at the destruction of the forests (“White mountain looking down / Disdainfully upon the upstart town / Where men built Banks and burned the forests down!”)—and not merely because of the jobs that would be lost as a result. The poem is dedicated to Leschi, the martyred Nisqually chief who fought against the imposition of European civilization. In it, Chaplin sings a lament for the hills that had become stark, naked, barren, the springs that had gone dry, “the sun a phantom in a fogged-out sky.” 159

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All of these civilized, and therefore unnatural, disasters he attributes to the industrial juggernaut. The poem ends on a note of resistance, with Leschi urging his people “to ring the wilderness with battle drums.” In May 1988, Franklin Rosemont edited a special issue of the Wobbly newspaper the Industrial Worker, in which he republished Chaplin’s poem. His aim with the paper (today a quarterly magazine) was to bring Earth First! and the IWW—two distinct but related direct-action movements—together for the first time. Although the usual run of the IW was only two thousand, Franklin arranged to print ten thousand copies of the May 1988 issue, and it had its impact. A month later, Earth First! organizer Judi Bari joined the Wobblies. And then came Redwood Summer, a direct-action organizing project that linked the causes of California lumber workers and environmental activists under the Wobbly agitprop banner “Dump the Bosses Off Yer Backs,” itself the name of the IWW direct-action standard by John Brill, its tune based on a detourned (as in détournement, the tactic of rerouting or diverting, pioneered by the Situationist International) version of the Christian hymn “Take It to the Lord in Prayer.” Redwood Summer so infuriated the lumber barons that Bari had a contract taken out on her life, and a bomb was planted in her car; its explosion caused her serious injury and, later, a premature death. Before delving more deeply into that formative May 1988 issue of the Industrial Worker, let us examine the historical connections between the surrealist movement and the natural world that led the Chicago group of surrealist-oriented rebel workers to involve themselves in such a project in the first place. Though the surrealist movement’s historical affinity for revolutionary and anticolonial struggles is well known, its celebration and defense of the natural world has been less studied. In particular, surrealists have long revered the ability of primal peoples to tap into the poetry inherent in nature. Perhaps the title of a 1937 article by Benjamin Péret that appeared in the signature surrealist journal Minotaure expresses it best: “Nature Devours Progress and Surpasses It.” In the 1940s, André Breton sang the praises of the birds he watched and listened closely to during his days of exile on the Gaspé Peninsula of Québec at the end of World War II. In his book Arcanum 17, written during his Gaspé sojourn, he laments, “At the top of the list of initial errors that remain the most detrimental stands the idea that the universe only has intelligible meaning for mankind, and that it has none, for instance, for animals. Man prides himself on being the chosen one of creation.”5 Instead of exhibiting such anthropocentric arrogance, Breton often invoked the ancient Chinese precept “follow nature,” and with this alchemical incantation in mind, he challenged the domesticated social order in the name of “mad love.” Later, the Chicagoans coined the phrase “ecology of the marvelous” to express their poetic sense of wonder in relation to the natural world from a surrealist perspective. They were inspired by the 1986 poetry book Meadowlark West, by Philip Lamantia, a longtime The Right to Insubordination

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philosophical anarchist who, at age sixteen, had been a precocious contributor to the New York–based wartime surrealist magazine VVV. Lamantia later became a part of Kenneth Rexroth’s Anarchist Circle in San Francisco and a coeditor of Ark, a groundbreaking single-issue magazine that featured many of the circle’s writers, along with the work of anarchist George Woodcock. In fact, it was Lamantia, champion of the “poetic criminal,” who first called the Earth First! movement to the attention of the Chicago group. The Chicago Surrealist Group’s encounter with painter and writer Leonora Carrington, a surrealist elder of great stature, during her stay in Chicago for several years in the late 1980s proved fortuitous for all concerned. Like Breton, Carrington had a deep interest in the “special knowledge” possessed by birds and other wild creatures and wondered how we might learn from that knowledge. Of all the social movements of that time, the one Carrington talked about most, and with the greatest sympathy, was radical environmentalism. She was a militant supporter of Earth First!, which was cofounded by Chicago Surrealist Group members in the mid-1980s. In particular, she liked the most radical part of the Earth First! program—that the movement’s aim should be not only to preserve existing wilderness, as in its denunciation of the clear-cutting of the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, but to expand wilderness by dismantling highways, malls, and other cement-blighted areas, letting wilderness take over. Invoking mythology, she constantly returned to the theme that the earth is a living being, and that, until people realize that basic truth and act accordingly, they will continue to destroy the planet and their own lives. She hated the mining industry for maiming the earth’s flesh, along with electric utilities for brutally plundering the planet’s nervous system, and she had an early concern about the greenhouse effect and climate change. Chicago surrealists have always been especially attentive to the radicalizing effect of nature in an urban context. They found the great snowstorm of ’67 an occasion for celebration, as the workday mentality that ruled the city came to a grinding halt and a large part of the population suddenly found time to play, build snow people, ski in the streets, and even (wonder of wonders) fraternize with strangers! This same liberatory theme was elaborated upon further in a May 1992 surrealist broadside honoring the great flood, as the Chicago River wrought its subterranean havoc in the central business district. In “A River’s Revenge! Surrealist Implications of the Great Flood,” the surrealist group noted gleefully: Any sudden end of “business as usual” ushers in possibilities for everything that is neither business nor usual. Momentarily freed of the stultifying routine of “making a living,” people find themselves confronted with a rare opportunity to live. In these unmanageable situations, the absolute superfluousness of all “management” becomes hilariously obvious. Spontaneously and joyfully, those who have always been “bored to death” reinvent, starting from zero, a life worth living. The 161

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oppressive tyranny of obligations, rules, sacrifice, obedience, realism and a multitude of so-called “lesser evils” gives way to the creative anarchy of desire. The “everyday” begins—however fleetingly—to fulfill the promise of poetry and our wildest dreams. . . . In the river’s subterranean fury every rebel against unfreedom has sensed a kindred spirit.6

With unashamed joy, the surrealists effectively offered a radically utopian reading of what the ruling bureaucracy defined as a disaster, and, like Philip Lamantia in his apocalyptic poem “Voice of Earth Mediums,” they invoked a riverine version of the “great ocean wave” as a weapon against industrial civilization.

Similarly, when wolves were being ruthlessly eradicated by the US government at the behest of the ranching lobby, these wild creatures were championed by the Chicago Surrealist Group and Chicago’s Earth First!, and this defense of wolves still resounds today with “recovered” wolf populations once again coming under the threat of bounty hunters in Idaho and Montana. Wolves were one of Leonora Carrington’s passional attractions, and she loved the Earth First! sticker that read, “Let There Be Wolves!” Such agitprop stickers, which are ubiquitous today but seemed relatively new to activists organizing in the 1980s, had originally been pioneered much earlier in the United States by the Wobblies, who called them “silent agitators.” The “Let There Be Wolves!” slogan was in turn the title of a short Chicago Surrealist Group piece about resistance to the war on wolves that appeared in Arsenal no. 4 (1989), along with the article “No Jails for Whales,” on the captive whale racket practiced by the Shedd Aquarium—which also achieved sticker status—and another that pointedly warned: “Hands Off Antarctica!” In fact, even in the early Chicago Surrealist Group tract “Theses on Vision,” originally published in 1966, the year the group was formed, the affinity with wolves was clear. The article concluded, “the forest is deep and the night is long, but we know the wolves are on our side.”7 Later, in a 1970 article published in the special surrealist issue of Radical America, Franklin argued that “there is something empty, rotten and wrong about any ‘politics’ which has nothing to say about the near-extinction of polar bears.”8 So when Leonora Carrington arrived on the Chicago scene, she was delighted to receive a copy from him of the Earth First! publication Grizzly Bear Report. But what does defending wolves and grizzlies have to do with wage slavery? Plenty! In “Why Rebel?,” the opening article of the first issue of the Rebel Worker, Wobbly class war veteran Fred Thompson accused capitalism of destroying the earth. “Capitalism is wrecking itself,” he wrote, “damaging the earth that nurtured it, and threatening to drag humanity into oblivion with it.”9 It was within such a long-standing Rebel Worker context, and with an understanding of the contradictions inherent in using the industrial unionism of the IWW as a vehicle for dismantling industrial civilization, that in 1988 Franklin decided to edit the aforementioned special issue, on radical environmentalism, The Right to Insubordination

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of the Industrial Worker. He chose the May Day issue as having the most propitious date for unleashing such an ambitious project on the world. After a front-page lead story headlined “Workers’ Direct Action Saves Rainforest,” the second-page editorial was titled “May Day, Red, Black—and Green.” Written by Franklin himself, it said in part, “The green May Day is itself more militant, more radical, more consciously in opposition to things as they are than its far more innocent antecedents—a consequence no doubt, of the precarious condition of all things green, and indeed of all life, on our endangered planet. This coming together again of the red and black and green traditions of May Day is a promising sign, hinting at the possibility of a more general radical renewal beyond the narrow boundaries of stifling ideologies and sects. A festival of singing and dancing, poetry and solidarity, May Day should offer a chance for all the dispossessed to assert their desire and will to change life, to heal the Earth, to build a new society in the shell of the old.”10 In this red, black, and green spirit, alongside an article appearing later in the newspaper that was placed on a page featuring a brawling May Day centerpiece poster by Gallery Bugs Bunny director Robert Green (fig. 9.1), was a glowing account of the new edition of Joyce Fig. 9.1  Robert Green, “America: Free for All” Kornbluh’s book Rebel Voices by surrealist col(May Day poster), Industrial Worker, May 1988, 10. Courtesy of Industrial Worker and the IWW. laborator and radical labor historian David Roediger. On the same page was an animal liberation book review (on which more below) by visual artist, instrument designer, experimental musician, and participating Chicago Surrealist Group member Hal Rammel. The review saluted Earth First!’s April 21 day of outrage against the US Forest Service while alluding to the date’s synergistic confluence with both John Muir Day and National Laboratory Animal Day. On the same page as Franklin’s editorial was a poem by Wobbly poet and printmaker Carlos Cortez, who, in subsequent years, was the organizer and curator of the “Traveling Wobbly Art Show,” and, along with the Rosemonts, a longtime board member of the radical Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company. The poem, “Adios Tecopita,” was an homage to the Tecopa pupfish, which in 1982 became the first species ever removed from the US government’s list of endangered species because it had become extinct. In the poem, 163

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Cortez placed the blame for its demise squarely on the shoulders of industrial civilization or, as T-Bone Slim once called it, “civilinsanity.” In an article titled “Workers and Wilderness” on the previous page, Franklin used the surrealist weapon of black humor to sum up the costs of such insanity: “It was a hell of a price to pay for indoor plumbing, plastic slipcovers and a medicine cabinet full of Valium.”11 And in his regular IW column, written under the name CC Redcloud to reflect the Indigenous part of his ancestry, Cortez made a related point: “If one listens to our captains of industry, the environmentalists are the enemies of human progress. Such may be true but the human progress they are enemies of is the progress of only a few humans—those who now own and control the machinery of production, those who can demand a higher price on things as they come closer to extinction.”12 These days, corporate “greenwashing” attempts to mask the inherent violence of capitalism toward nature, and corporate media, spin a “jobs versus the environment” web over the eyes of the public, but the name of the game for the capitalist state has not changed in relation to either the workplace or the natural world: exploitation for profit. In describing the dynamics of resistance to such a state of affairs, Franklin concluded, “The struggle for wilderness is also a struggle against Capital, and the renewal of wilderness contributes to the struggle for the abolition of wage slavery.” Therefore, he urged his readers, “Workers of the World, be wild!”13 Opposite a subscription form to Earth First! Journal were two articles penned by Franklin and pointedly signed with his Wobbly redcard number (X322339) rather than his name, a practice often followed by contributors to IW to this day. In the first, “Fellow Workers, Meet Earth First!,” he made a link between Wobblies and Earth First!ers from an IWW point of view, writing, “Uniting the wilderness radicalism of the great ‘Yosemite Prophet’ John Muir and the flamboyant direct-action tactics of the IWW, Earth First! has transformed the most vital current of the old conservation movement into something qualitatively new and incomparably more radical, and at the same time has helped to bring out a new and wilder dimension to the old Wobbly dream expressed by Fred Thompson of making this planet ‘a good place to live.’”14 Noting that these two radical movements had a lot to learn from each other, the companion article, “Earth First!ers, Meet the IWW,” made a key distinction between the self-organizing milieu of the IWW and the top-down business unionism of the AFL-CIO, the main function of which in the capitalist system is to control labor. Rather than seek to abolish wage slavery, the AFL-CIO only wants to mitigate its consequences and acts as an apologist for the miserable bargain offered to workers between employment and a green planet. This same special IW issue also included an unattributed interview with Roger Featherstone titled “Earth First! and the IWW.” Featherstone was then a “roving editor” of Earth First! Journal. In the interview, he said: The Right to Insubordination

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I think the jobs issue is a red herring. It’s a bone thrown out by those in charge to get folks fighting with each other. We need to have the guts to say no to jobs and a system that destroys the environment, and to fight for a society free of such devastation. A blow to save wilderness is a blow to the assholes that are screwing the workers. A lot of people in the Earth First! movement admire the early history of the IWW. We admire the IWW spirit, sense of humor, art and music: its direct action tactics; its unwillingness to buy into the political scene; its no-compromise attitude, and, most importantly, its guts. I think the spirit of the Earth First! movement today would make Bill Haywood and Joe Hill smile and say “right on!”15

In fact, Earth First!’s Ecodefense Manual (which was reviewed elsewhere in this special issue of IW) listed as one of its coeditors the long-deceased Wobbly organizer Big Bill Haywood. Along with the Li’l Green Songbook (reviewed by the mysterious Punapilvi in the same issue), which was modeled on the IWW’s Little Red Songbook, these Earth First! publications owed a great debt to the subversive counterculture of direct action and sabotage created by the IWW. While the Li’l Green Songbook is now regrettably out of print, the Wobbly songbook was later reprinted in expanded form by the Rosemonts through Charles H. Kerr Publishing. Perhaps a song written by an Earth First!er with the moniker Walkin’ Jim Stoltz best explains the link between Earth First! and the Wobblies. It is a friendly appropriation of Joe Hill’s call to arms, “There Is Power in a Union,” which Stoltz reworked into a song called “There Is Power in the Earth.” Of course, Hill’s original had itself cleverly detourned the melody of the well-known Christian hymn “There Is Power in the Blood of the Lamb.” In the Ecodefense Manual, Dave Foreman of Earth First! clearly stated in the introduction that monkey-wrenching was an ethical form of nonviolent resistance rather than a type of terrorism, since it was not directed toward human beings or other life-forms. In the newspaper’s book review, “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm,” the reviewer, Lobo X99, gave a verbal wink and nod to this monkey-wrenching statement, and said with approval, “It does an old Wobbly’s heart good to see that this new how-to book sets the record straight in regard to the dignity and decency of sabotage.”16 The following year, another review of the book appeared in Arsenal no. 4 under the title “Why Not Try Monkeywrenching?,” written for “those who prefer poetry to property—those who realize that subverting the dominant paradigm is a sacred obligation as well as one of life’s supreme pleasures.”17 The back cover of that issue of Arsenal tellingly displayed two quotations—one by André Breton defining “pure psychic automatism,” and the other by John Muir, which said, “a little pure wildness is the one great present want.” On the same page as the IW review was an “open letter to Wobblies everywhere” by Montana Earth First!er Randall Restless, titled “Common Ground.” Reaffirming the direct-action tactical affinity between the Wobblies and Earth First! found in previous 165

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Fig. 9.2  Joel Williams, Surrealism in the Service of Revolution (and Vice Versa), Industrial Worker, May 1988, 8. Courtesy of Industrial Worker and the IWW.

articles, and similarly lambasting “the mindless industrial technocracy” that worships profit and power, Restless went on to expand the hallowed Wobbly slogan “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All” to include the natural world. “What is the value of freedom from political repression,” he asked, “if there is not clean air left to breathe, no clean water left to drink, no untainted food left to eat? The exploiters of the working class are also the exploiters of the Earth. Let’s work together to rid the planet of all exploitation! An injury to one is an injury to all!”18 While Franklin was consciously trying to forge links between the Wobblies and Earth First! in the May 1988 special issue of IW, he did not shy away from including the Chicago Surrealist Group in this mélange of direct-action solidarity. Unlike other allegedly avant-garde art movements, the Chicago Surrealist Group had always rejected the exclusivity of considering itself, or being considered, an avant-garde movement, and had used a radically inclusive strategy as one of its most subversive tools. Accordingly, The Right to Insubordination

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under a totemic surrealist collage by Joel Williams (fig. 9.2) on the page following Restless’s open letter was an article titled “Surrealism in the Service of Revolution (and Vice Versa),” which noted that many American surrealists carried IWW red cards and had also been actively involved in Earth First! Reprinted in this boxed portion of the page were two no-holds-barred Chicago Surrealist Group tracts, “Why Say No?” and “An Unjust Dominion.” The first piece, predictably, listed among its “immediate surrealist demands” the “global suppression of wage slavery” and the “expansion of wilderness everywhere,” and also mentioned related surrealist demands for “absolute sexual freedom and the eroticization of everyday life,” “emancipation of children,” and the “destruction of family, church and state.”19 Similarly, the “Unjust Dominion” article, by Chicago Surrealist Group members Hal Rammel and painter Gina Litherland (originally published in the International Surrealist Bulletin of September 1986), upped the ante by raising the issue of animal liberation as part of an emancipatory project to confound the corporate media’s emphasis on promulgating a dichotomous “endangered spotted owl vs jobs” mindset. The reactionary strategic context of this divideand-conquer strategy was further addressed Fig. 9.3  C. E. Setzer, “Whooose Side Are You in an article by Barbara Hansen, complete On?,” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 4. Courtesy with a vintage cartoon by IWW artist C. E. of Industrial Worker and the IWW. Setzer advocating a four-hour workday and featuring a wise Wobbly May Day owl asking, “Whooose side are you on?” (fig. 9.3). The cause of animal liberation remained an urgent concern. The previously mentioned animal liberation book review by Rammel, which originally appeared in Rosemont’s 1988 special issue of the Industrial Worker, also discussed B. R. Boyd’s book The New Abolitionists: Animal Rights and Human Liberation. There, Rammel further clarified the “Unjust Dominion” point of view that the terrain of capitalist injury should include animals. In order to enhance that argument, Rammel mentioned that Boyd’s book included a reworked version of a well-known statement by Eugene Debs, one of the founders of the IWW, that had been expanded to include other species besides humans: “While there is yet a class of exploited beings, we are of it.” Rammel also noted that the book’s back cover drove home the concept of a “big tent” by reproducing a photograph of animal liberation demonstrators unfurling a banner that read, “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All.”20 167

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Fig. 9.4  Hal Rammel, “Direct Action Gets the Goods,” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 1. Courtesy of Industrial Worker and the IWW.

Surrealists were attempting to situate animal liberation in the context of past and present battles against the exploitation of the working class. Perhaps even Rammel’s humorous “May Day Greetings” front-page illustration, which featured no fewer than six feisty cartoon cats under the “Sab Cat” banner of “Direct Action Gets the Goods,” was at least partly about solidarity with animals by questioning pet animal stereotypes of subservience to a master and obsequious cuteness (fig. 9.4). Moreover, a review of Donald Rooum’s Wildcat Anarchist Comics, which appeared in the same IW issue, linked the Wobbly image of the black cat as a symbol of workplace resistance to Rooum’s later creation of Wildcat as a feline symbol of anarchy and alluded to a cartoon in the book that connected the coal industry to the exploitation of both workers and the environment. Finally, the back page of the newspaper featured an article by the Chicago IWW chapter critiquing the all-American hamburger McInstitution, a favorite target of animal liberationists everywhere, titled “What’s Wrong with McDonald’s?” The Right to Insubordination

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The Continuing Relevance of Surrealism in the Twenty-First Century A deep concern for the “ecology of the marvelous” has not been a mere passing fancy for the Chicago Surrealist Group. In May 2010, the Surrealist Movement in the United States (which has the Chicago group at its core) published an ecological manifesto online titled “Another Paradise Lost! A Surrealist Program of Demands on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster,” which linked the consequences of that oil explosion for both wildlife and humans. The manifesto, which begins under the sign of the octopus, was dedicated to Wobbly/Earthfirst!er Judi Bari and the following political prisoners: imprisoned ecoactivist Marie Mason, Mexican Robin Hood bank robber Oso Blanco Chubbuck, and the “coming insurrectionaries” known as the Tarnac Nine. In this manifesto, the true face of ecoterrorism is revealed to be a corporate one. Once again under the Wobbly banner of “an injury to one is an injury to all,” and with a nod to the eleven workers killed in the BP explosion, the manifesto indicted BP oil executives and their governmental collaborators for ecocide. It demanded that these oil barons be tried by a popular tribunal consisting of residents of the Gulf Shore communities directly affected by their actions (and inaction), with the Earth Liberation Front and Earth First! to be brought in as witnesses, especially those among them who were then serving time in prison for their work in defense of the natural world. As the manifesto declared in ringing tones of disgust and contempt, “The least we can hope for as an outcome is that the accused will be tarred with their own petroleum wastes and feathered with the soiled plumage of murdered birds.” In a similarly outraged vein, it called for the dismantling of all oil, coal, and nuclear power companies engaged in extractive violence. This uncompromising refusal to accept the false solution of bureaucratic mitigation is firmly anchored in the anarcho-surrealist tradition of “demanding the impossible,” in this case in the name of brown pelicans, shrimp, frigate birds, marlins, sea bass, laughing gulls, octopi, and piping plovers. The manifesto ended with an insurrectionary graffiti sighting in Mobile, Alabama: “When life gives you oil spills, make Molotovs!”21 Because of its continuous history of radicalism in relation to the ecological outrages perpetrated by industrial civilization, the Chicago Surrealist Group, in recent years, has found a radical green affinity with such direct-action-oriented magazines as Green Anarchy (which is now sadly defunct) and the Earth First! Journal (which is still alive and kicking). In 1971, years before the animal liberation movement started making headlines, the Chicago surrealists issued “The Anteater’s Umbrella: A Contribution to the Critique of Zoos,” a tract initiated by Penelope Rosemont, who once noted that her first word as a child was “outside.” The tract was initially distributed by the Chicago group at the entrance to Lincoln Park Zoo. The unsuspecting zoogoer who took the proffered leaflet read: 169

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It is not without significance that animals in zoos are captured and brought against their wills to this, the penitentiary of the instincts. Here, in the zoo, in this place of hypnotic fascinations, human beings come to see their own instincts caged and sterilized. Everything that is intrinsic to humankind, but smothered by capitalist society, appears safely in a zoo. Aggression, sexuality, motion, desire, play, the very impulses to freedom are trapped and displayed for the alienated enjoyment and manipulation of men, women and children. The cages are merely the extensions of the cages that omnipresently infest the lives of all living beings. The brutal confinement of animals ultimately serves only to separate men and women from their own potentialities.22

This “zoo-as-Bastille” polemic problematizes an unexamined part of everyday spectacular reality considered to be as normal as a family picnic. In turn, it also causes us to reflect deeply, not only on the problem of animals as victims but also on our own victimization and submerged desire for freedom. “The Anteater’s Umbrella” would later be reprinted in Green Anarchy magazine in the fall of 2002 because of its anticivilization affinities and commended therein for attacking the animal liberation issue from a revolutionary rather than a moralistic perspective. Green Anarchy would also publish two other articles excerpted from Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Experiences, in its winter 2004 and summer 2005 issues. One of these, “The Psychopathology of Work,” is of particular interest in reference to the Wobblies. Because Penelope’s argument was based on a refusal of work in the revolutionary context of an end to wage slavery, it was welcomed by Green Anarchy for publication. Though Green Anarchy was sometimes mistakenly criticized—particularly by anarcho-syndicalists—for being against workers, its editorial philosophy was actually more nuanced. Penelope’s article appealed to the Green Anarchy editors precisely because, while the magazine had always been critical of workerist tendencies in the anarchist movement, it did not seek to direct its editorial wrath self-righteously at wage slaves themselves, but rather at the institution of wage slavery. Similarly, Green Anarchy would publish surrealist-inspired pieces of my own on miserabilism and Eurocentrism as compatible with a green anarchist analysis.23 In addition to these Green Anarchy reprints, the Earth First! Journal’s special thirtieth anniversary issue, volume 1 (November 2010) decided to run an excerpted version of a recent collaborative text by the Chicago Surrealist Group / Moon First! Collective: “No Compromise in Defense of the Dark Side of the Moon.”24 The tract was originally written in response to NASA’s LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) Project A119, which committed the “unimaginable poetic atrocity” of engaging in the nuclear bombardment of the dark side of the moon. Volume 2 of the thirtieth anniversary issue (February 2011) reprinted an excerpt from a much earlier article, coauthored by Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger, titled “Three Days That Shook the New World Order,” which had originally appeared in the 1993 Chicago Surrealist Group publication What The Right to Insubordination

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Are You Going to Do About It? and, soon after, in Race Traitor (Summer 1993), and a decade later in my own Surrealist Subversions anthology. Rosemont and Roediger’s piece, on the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, began with Wobbly T-Bone Slim’s observation that “wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.”25 The essay emphasizes solidarity between ghetto/barrio street fighters, eco-activists, radical feminists, and rebel workers at the point of production in order to inspire the kind of radical inclusivity that will destroy the toxic institutional structures that are killing both the planet and its human inhabitants. It is alternately a call to mutual aid, play, and adventure that proclaims: The struggle for wilderness is inseparable from the struggle for a free society, which is inseparable from the struggle against racism, whiteness and imperialism, which is inseparable from the struggle for the liberation of women, which is inseparable from the struggle for sexual freedom, which is inseparable from the struggle to emancipate labor and abolish work, which is inseparable from the struggle against war, which is inseparable from the struggle to lead poetic lives and, more generally, to do as we please. The enemies today are those who try to separate these struggles. Outsiders of the world unite! Freedom Now! Earth First! These three watchwords are for us but one.26

The Earth First! editors pointed out in a footnote that this deeply surrealist article has often been read around the campfire at Earth First! gatherings. Lately, it has been especially relevant in rejecting the warped US interpretation of ecology that would exclude Mexican immigration to an area of the United States that historically is actually “occupied Mexico” in favor of a more expansive “no borders” approach to understanding the nature of revolutionary solidarity.

Conclusion While it is known for its scathing polemics aimed at toppling the institutions of oppression and repression, the Chicago Surrealist Group has correspondingly been a voice for radical inclusivity in seeking to join forces with like-minded direct actionists fighting to break the authoritarian grip of industrial civilization. Yet, as Franklin Rosemont duly noted, poetry matters: “Unless it is rooted in the practice of poetry—the experience of ‘outside’ from within—even the deepest ‘deep ecology’ barely scratches the surface.”27 From a Chicago Surrealist Group perspective, the poetic practice of taking direct action to destroy the miserabilism of industrial civilization, a practice exhibited by both Wobbly and Earth First! activists, can animate the creative power to envision and construct a multiplicity of exciting new possibilities that are located at the unmapped crossroads of dream and reality. 171

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Notes

Versions of this chapter, published under the same 14. Rosemont, “Fellow Workers, Meet Earth title, appear in “The Surrealist Adventure and First!” the Poetry of Direct Action,” Journal of Aesthetics 15. Featherstone, “Earth First! and the IWW.” and Protest 8 (Winter 2011–12): 113–43; Sakolsky, 16. Lobo X99, “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm.” Scratching the Tiger’s Belly, 30–63; and Sakolsky, 17. See Chicago Surrealist Group, “Why Not Dreams of Anarchy. Try Monkeywrenching?,” in Sakolsky, Surrealist 1. Rosemont, Joe Hill, 27. Subversions, 478. 2. Franklin Rosemont, “To Be Revolutionary in 18. Restless, “Common Ground.” Everything: The Rebel Worker Story, 1964–68,” in 19. Chicago Surrealist Group, “Why Say No?” Rosemont and Radcliffe, Dancin’ in the Streets, 1, 15. 20. Rammel, “New Abolitionists.” 3. Franklin Rosemont, introduction to ibid., 42, 21. Surrealist Movement in the United States, 50. “Another Paradise Lost! A Surrealist Program of 4. Franklin Rosemont, introduction to Slim, Demands on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster,” May Juice Is Stranger Than Friction, 29. 2010, https://​charleshkerr​.com​/images​/oil​-disaster​ 5. Breton, Arcanum 17, 58. -surrealist​-response​-v2​.pdf. 6. Chicago Surrealist Group, “A River’s Revenge! 22. Chicago Surrealist Group, “The Anteater’s Surrealist Implications of the Great Flood,” in Umbrella: A Contribution to the Critique of Zoos,” Sakolsky, Surrealist Subversions, 447–48. in Sakolsky, Surrealist Subversions, 374. 7. Chicago Surrealist Group, “Theses on Vision,” 23. Sakolsky, “Why Misery Loves Company,” in Rosemont, Rosemont, and Garon, Forecast Is Hot, reprinted in Sakolsky, Swift Winds, 25–30; Sakolsky, 9. “Surrealist Re-Imagining of Canada,” reprinted in 8. See Rosemont, Revolution in the Service of the Sakolsky, Creating Anarchy, 158–61. Marvelous, 11n1. 24. Chicago Surrealist Group / Moon First! 9. Fred Thompson, “Why Rebel?,” in Rosemont Collective, “No Compromise.” and Radcliffe, Dancin’ in the Streets, 85. 25. Slim, Juice Is Stranger Than Friction, 32. 10. Rosemont, “May Day, Red, Black—and Green.” 26. Rosemont and Roediger, “Three Days”; see 11. Rosemont, “Workers and Wilderness.” also Ignatiev and Garvey, Race Traitor, 102–21; 12. Redcloud [Cortez], “Left Side.” Sakolsky, Surrealist Subversions, 498. 13. Rosemont, “Workers and Wilderness.” 27. Rosemont, Open Entrance to the Shut Palace, 151.

Bibliography

Breton, André. Arcanum 17: With Apertures Grafted to the End. Translated by Zack Rogow. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994. Chicago Surrealist Group. “Why Say No?” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 8. Chicago Surrealist Group / Moon First! Collective. “No Compromise in Defense of the Dark Side of the Moon.” Earth First! Journal, thirtieth anniversary issue, vol. 1, November 2010, 104. Featherstone, Roger. “Earth First! and the IWW.” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 6. Ignatiev, Noel, and John Garvey, eds. Race Traitor. New York: Routledge, 1996. Lobo X99. “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm.” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 7. Rammel, Hal. “The New Abolitionists: Animal Rights and Human Liberation, by B. R. Boyd.” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 10. Redcloud, CC [Carlos Cortez]. “Left Side.” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 4.

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Restless, Randall. “Common Ground: An Open Letter to Wobblies Everywhere.” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 7. Rosemont, Franklin. “Fellow Workers, Meet Earth First!” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 5. ———. Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2003. ———. “May Day, Red, Black—and Green.” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 2. ———. An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2003. ———. Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous: Surrealist Contributions to the Critique of Miserabilism. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2003. ———. “Workers and Wilderness.” Industrial Worker, May 1988, 3. Rosemont, Franklin, and Charles Radcliffe, eds. Dancin’ in the Streets! Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists, and Provos in the 1960s as Recorded in the Pages of “The Rebel 172

Worker” and “Heatwave.” Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2005. Rosemont, Franklin, and David Roediger. “Three Days That Shook the New World Order.” 1993. Earth First! Journal, thirtieth anniversary issue, vol. 2, February 2011, 59. Rosemont, Franklin, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon, eds. The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts and Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, 1966–1976. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997. Sakolsky, Ron. Creating Anarchy. Berkeley: Ardent Press, 2013. ———. Dreams of Anarchy and the Anarchy of Dreams: Adventures at the Crossroads of Anarchy and Surrealism. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2020.

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———. Scratching the Tiger’s Belly. Portland, OR: Eberhardt Press, 2012. ———. “A Surrealist Re-Imagining of Canada.” Green Anarchy, Fall 2003, 3. ———, ed. Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings, and Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2002. ———. Swift Winds. Portland, OR: Eberhardt Press, 2009. ———. “Why Misery Loves Company.” Green Anarchy, Summer/Fall 2006, 17. Slim, T-Bone. Juice Is Stranger Than Friction: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim. Edited by Franklin Rosemont. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1992.

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A Useful Bile

André Breton’s Humour Noir in 1960s America Ryan Standfest

10.

In 1935, André Breton identified a sensibility he labeled humour noir (literally, “black humor”), with the intention of cultivating a modernist humor to confront the despairing spirit of the day. For Breton, humour noir was a dispassionate, provocative form of expression and a consequential component of the surrealist project to liberate the intellect. In the United States throughout the 1960s, a similar sensibility resurfaced under the label “black humor.” American black humorists responded to the sociopolitical unrest of the era with ironic distance and a nihilistic attitude. Their use of “lower” and more popular forms of media, such as cartoons and cinema, helped transgress mainstream American cultural attitudes, challenging codified social norms. Although proponents of American black humor in the 1960s appear to have had no awareness of Breton’s earlier prescription, his vision of a consequential, ironic humor would nonetheless be shared and tested as a form of expressive revolt. Black humor in the United States, like Breton’s humour noir, would confront the pervasive despair of

the time. When American society convulsed, black humorists responded with comic provocation and cultural nihilism. The term “black humor” once referred to an excess of black bile produced by the spleen that was believed to be the cause of melancholia, as suggested by the medical theory of the four humors that prevailed from ancient times until the eighteenth century. Breton appropriated the term and the temperamental preoccupation with all things tragic and cruel that it summoned, identifying humour noir as an oppositional behavior in service to independent thinking. This conception of humour noir was rooted in Breton’s friendship with the soldier Jacques-Pierre Vaché, whom he met in February 1916. This new, cynical comrade believed in ridicule as a means of survival. Breton described himself and Vaché as “good-humored terrorists,” and they cultivated an intellectual dialogue, later collected

in Vaché’s War Letters (1919), that nurtured much of Breton’s early conceptualizing of surrealism.1 Among these letters, Vaché elucidated l’umour, or humor without the “h,” which he conceived as a dispassionate ethos—“a sensation—I almost said a sense—that too—of the theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of everything.”2 This sense or sensation was an awareness of the despairing spirit of the era, allowing a way to respond via informed disruption: tuning in and making one’s presence felt as an agent provocateur to thwart an epoch and its institutions, dogma, and hypocrisy. Vaché intended l’umour to combat the stagnant attitude of a bourgeoisie overcome with boredom. From this, Breton developed humour noir (which he regarded as l’umour in essence) to describe a modernist form of anti-amusement: a humor for the age as a revolutionary tool. Breton began assembling his literary Anthologie de l’humour noir in 1935 at the suggestion of American poet Édouard Roditi, but its impact as a propitious voice for the age was impeded by numerous setbacks as it passed through the hands of several publishers experiencing financial strain. Breton aimed for a wartime publication, since it “would have considerable tonic value,”3 but the book was censored in 1940 by the Vichy government on the grounds that Breton was involved in “a negation of the spirit of national revolution.”4 It was not until 1945 that the Anthologie was finally released to a fatigued postwar audience. A revised edition was released in 1950 and a final updated version appeared in 1966, just prior to Breton’s death, with the events in Paris of May 1968 two years away and in an atmosphere charged with revolutionary fervor. The definitive 1966 edition contains the work of forty-five authors, each prefaced by a short introduction by Breton. Among the authors included are Jonathan Swift, the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Lewis Carroll, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Guillaume Apollinaire, Franz Kafka, Jacques Vaché, Benjamin Péret, Salvador Dalí, and the only female writer in the group, Leonora Carrington. The first edition contained an introductory essay titled “Lightning Rod,” which delineated a complete theory of humour noir (without specifically defining it); the 1966 introduction acknowledged how humour noir had flourished since 1945; the collection was both of its time and ahead of its time: Let us simply recall that when it first appeared, the words “black humor” made no sense. It is only afterward that the expression took its place in the dictionary: we know what fortune the notion of black humor has enjoyed. Everything suggests that it remains full of effervescence, and is spreading as much by word of mouth as in the visual arts (especially in the cartoons featured in certain weekly magazines) and in film (at least when it deviates from the safe path of mainstream production). My wish is that this book should remain directly linked to our era no less than the preceding one, and that it should never be seen as some sort of constantly updated annual, a pathetic honor roll bearing no trace whatsoever of its original purpose.5

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Echoing Vaché, Breton intended surrealist humor not merely as an aesthetic expression or a genre but as an impression or sense of the world, free of ideological specifics. Humour noir is an amplifier transmitting distress signals from the despairing social unconscious; it is often nihilistic, an antistrategy of revolt, powered by active inversion rather than bound to aesthetic rules or guidelines. Much of black humor is founded on incongruity and contradiction and by its nature is oppositional to environmental circumstance. Humour noir stands in particular opposition to an obvious expression of joy, and its noir quality arises from ever-present associations with death. It requires something to revolt against and serves not as direct commentary but as a response to ever-shifting conditions, making a specific definition unattainable. What identifies humour noir as a surrealist attitude lies in its disjunctive, oppositional nature. It promotes the surrealist aspiration of creative critical inquiry as a liberating strategy aimed at examining and undermining bourgeois cultural forms by means of displacement, interference, and contradiction. It is uninterested in achieving mere laughter through standard comic effects, but cultivates a state of discomfort and detachment so as to foster awareness of a hidden social apparatus against which to revolt. In this sense, humour noir reveals its debt to Freud’s 1927 essay “Der Humor” and, more specifically, to Freud’s remarks on “gallows humor,” exemplified by the criminal who is led to the gallows on Monday and exclaims, “What a way to start the week!” For Freud, and later for Breton, gallows humor served as a means of overcoming a hopeless situation by asserting control over it. Freud writes, “The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”6 Gallows humor surfaces, then, from the ego’s inability (or refusal) to confront reality. There can be no doubt that this view of humor appealed to surrealism’s rebellion against the acceptance of perceived reality—as Breton (quoting Freud) wrote in the introduction to the Anthologie, humor possesses a “liberating and elevating effect.”7 Accordingly, Doug Haynes observes that the “Anthologie is full of examples of figures whose ethical horizons, released from a superstitious fear of divine retribution, are defined by the systematic, skeptical coherence of disillusioned reason.”8 The surrealists viewed the Marquis de Sade, featured in the Anthologie, as the preeminent black humorist, a man who confronted the sociopolitical climate of eighteenth-century France, most notably in his 120 Days of Sodom (1785), which can be viewed as the ne plus ultra of humour noir in its detached and absurdly methodical compilation of unimaginable atrocities. It is in the writings of Sade, and in Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay “A Modest Proposal” (1729), which opens the Anthologie, that a central element of black humor can be found: the loss of one’s true nature within an economic system driven by transactional violence Passional Attractions

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and the commodification of death. In Sade and Swift, the cruelty of socioeconomic and political thought and practices, born of excess rationality, is illustrated in an ironic tone situated somewhere between reason and delusion, mirroring the abusive indifference of such a system. It is the goal of these texts, and of black humorists generally, to reveal with unsentimental objectivity the absence of morality in a society—a society in which institutional injustice is economically justifiable and hypocrisy is reinforced by a rational mechanism that calculates and measures expenditure. Following World War II, the economic program to aggressively shape a middle-class “American Dream” produced a new form of comic subversion in the mid- to late 1950s, pejoratively labeled by critics at the time as “sick humor,” when stand-up comedians riffed on their discomfort with assimilating into a social template. This edgy sensibility took the form of parody, cynicism, and social criticism—as evidenced in the satirical MAD magazine, founded in 1952. Sick soon turned to black as the tone sharpened. In 1965, at the invitation of Bantam Press, the writer Bruce Jay Friedman edited an anthology of short fiction titled Black Humor. Among the selected authors were John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Terry Southern, and Friedman himself. In his foreword, Friedman described the collection as representing “a nervousness, a tempo, a near hysterical new beat in the air, a punishing isolation and loneliness of a strange, frenzied new kind.”9 But Friedman was never comfortable with the term “black humor” (the publisher devised it) and preferred “tense comedy.” He was surprised that the label “would catch fire to the extent that it did—and last these many years. The academics, starving for a new category, wolfed it down.” For Friedman, the tone of the writings “was much darker than what was found in most popular fiction at the time. It also confronted—perhaps not consciously—social issues that hadn’t been touched on.”10 Distinct from sick humor, black humor spoke to the ills of an entire society rather than to the “sickness” of an individual. The threat of “the bomb,” the escalation of the Vietnam War, and social unrest in the United States fueled an onslaught of black humor in the 1960s, unleashing a unique form of outrage in which humor became weaponized in the cultural arsenal of those disaffected by sociopolitical policies. Although characterized as fatally absurd, the black humor of the 1960s was at its heart a revolutionary gesture signaling intellectual independence. The traits that Breton had identified in humour noir were on full display. While he did not directly sow the seeds of black humor in the United States, a comparison with his notion of oppositional humor reveals elements of humour noir in the cultural landscape of 1960s America, echoing the revolutionary sensibility Breton had formulated in the late 1930s. Mathew Winston, in his 1972 essay “Humour Noir and Black Humor,” identified two different forms of the American variant of black humor (often interchangeable and blurred): the absurd and the grotesque. According to Winston, absurd black humor 179

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presents purely comical absurd characters who occupy and adjust to an aberrant world filled with repetition and limitation; a new “normal” results. Grotesque black humor is much blacker than the absurd variety; it is “obsessed with the human body, with the ways in which it can be distorted, separated into its component parts, mutilated and abused. Bodily parts are exaggerated or distorted. The body’s inability to keep to its proper confines is comic.”11 An early example of absurdist black humor in postwar American literature is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), which portrays a hopelessly irrational world. The writings of the Beats were transformed into something more grotesque with the work of William S. Burroughs and Terry Southern. Although the two authors’ first publications appeared in Paris in the late 1950s by way of Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, both were eventually published in the United States after attempts at censorship by the American public and the courts failed. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch cleared the threshold in 1962, and Terry Southern’s Candy (in collaboration with Mason Hoffenberg) in 1964. Naked Lunch used the avant-garde technique of cutting and randomly pasting passages together to tell a comically nightmarish story of the body under attack from within and without through the use of boundary-pushing, sexually explicit language. Southern and Hoffenberg’s Candy, ostensibly a smutty novel concerning the sexual antics of a nubile all-American girl, was a satire of Voltaire’s Candide (1759), itself a satire, and an attack upon the pretense of “American normalcy.” Candy exemplifies two recurring elements of American black humor in the 1960s: a faltering male hegemony and its propensity to use the female body as a site of sacrifice. A series of religious, educational, and military father figures, symbols of institutional social hierarchy, are exposed and invalidated throughout the novel. The American political patriarchy, too, was undergoing a historic emasculation: white masculine power was losing its grip as the war in Vietnam regressed into failure. The civil rights and women’s liberation movements, which also had influenced the growing antiwar movement, were shaking the pillar of dominance from its base. The counterculture was on the rise. In response, American black humor became gendered, targeting a male audience with its aggressive physicality and prankish schoolboy cruelty, all the while exaggerating the insecurity and lost control (including self-control) that was undermining the nation’s masculine psyche. Symbolic impotence and castration became recurring motifs in opposition to the outsized masculine rhetoric offered up by the Johnson administration as it waged its war. Reflecting on the 1968 Tet Offensive, Lyndon B. Johnson was quoted as saying, “I didn’t just screw Ho Chi Minh, I cut his pecker off.”12 No one is spared in Candy, least of all the all-American Candy Christian, the sacrificial lamb who is corrupted at every turn. In much American black humor, rape is used as a shocking metaphor for sociopolitical acts that the authoritarian patriarchy was committing on the American body politic. Unlike Breton’s surrealist agenda, which was Passional Attractions

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preoccupied with the perversity of male sexual fantasies rather than with a critique of the masculine psyche, American countercultural art, cinema, and literature often satirized destructive masculine urges—but only to a degree. The crippling nature of male perversity is put on public display in postwar American black humor, but the satire and implicit critique could also be seen as morbidly erotic entertainment for a male audience. Empathy for the victim is uncommon in black humor, as the drive to deliver nihilism can often eclipse moral or ethical considerations. Following the success of Candy, Terry Southern became the representative of black humor in America; his short stories and essays appeared in Esquire, the Evergreen Review, Glamour, and the Nation. He coauthored the screenplays for three cinematic black comedies: Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Loved One (1965), and a product of early independent cinema, End of the Road (1970). Whereas Dr. Strangelove and The Loved One are both giddily nihilistic and joyfully mordant comedies aimed at mainstream culture, End of the Road (adapted from a novel by John Barth) has an air of total disillusionment. Written and shot in 1968, End of the Road opens with a montage of images from the era: student protests, Vietnam War atrocities, the Detroit rebellion, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the ascendency of Richard Nixon. Over this imagery plays a Billie Holiday rendition of the song Don’t Worry ’Bout Me, with the lyric, “Baby, why stop and cling, to some fading thing that used to be?” Like a bleaker iteration of 1967’s The Graduate, the narrative concerns the rite of passage of a young graduate student and his search for self. Following his graduation from Johns Hopkins, Jacob Horner (Stacey Keach) sinks into a catatonic state and sits waiting at a rail station, where the unorthodox Doctor D (James Earl Jones) discovers him. Doctor D takes Jacob to the “Farm”—a parody of a hippie commune overrun by lunatics and fetishists—where the possibly psychotic doctor reconditions him to find purpose in life by avoiding intimate relationships, staying away from anything political, and taking on a teaching position at a university. After finding employment at a small college as a professor of English grammar, Jacob begins an affair with the wife of an egomaniacal faculty colleague, eventually impregnating her. This leads to a realistically depicted abortion (which earned the film an X rating), incompetently performed by Doctor D at the “Farm,” resulting in the death of the woman and sending the doctor into a catatonic state. Despite being the subject of a nine-page, heavily illustrated article in the November 7, 1969, issue of Life magazine, End of the Road was poorly received by critics and audiences alike. It is no coincidence that the apogee of black humor in America occurred when the collective social consciousness had reached its saturation point from domestic assassinations and the US involvement in the Vietnam War. The body politic was diseased, and the imagery reflected this sick body, albeit without offering a cure. Coming at the end of the 1960s, after the obvious breakdown of American institutions and two years after 181

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the beginning of the Tet Offensive, End of the Road was apocalyptic in its assessment of the national condition. As noted above, in his foreword to the 1966 edition of the Anthologie, Breton recognized the popular medium of cartoons—“especially in the cartoons featured in certain weekly magazines”—as a means of disseminating humour noir.13 An early example of American black humor in popular cartoons was the work of Charles Addams, who embraced the spirit of black humor in the 1940s and whose work reached a crest of popularity in the mid-1960s. In gag cartoons that appeared in the pages of the New Yorker, Addams was unique in his macabre rigor and insistence on undermining any sense of normal American socialization. The finest example was his conception of evil domesticity in The Addams Family. The popularity of the characters depicted in his cartoons of the family was such that they were brought to life on network television during primetime, beginning in September 1964. Although Addams expressed some disappointment in the translation from cartoon to screen, feeling that the result was a “typical suburban family. Not half as evil as my original characters,”14 the show could still be viewed as a riposte to previous sitcoms that depicted the American “normal” in a more wholesome way. This was, after all, the story of a family that gleefully flirted with murder and masochism. While the Addams Family TV sitcom enjoyed mainstream popularity, much 1960s black humor emerged from underground subcultures. Low-budget films, from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and John Waters’s Mondo Trasho (1969) to music by Captain Beefheart (Trout Mask Replica, 1969) and Frank Zappa (We’re Only in It for the Money, 1968), formed a new underground with a raw, dark sensibility as a sardonic antidote to the hippie counterculture. Underground black humor thrived on the lowcost production and distribution opportunities provided by alternative outlets. In this, economics determined form. As is often the case when the disaffected respond to social conditions, the cheapest and most accessible means were employed out of necessity. The DIY approach also allowed for content beyond mainstream values, free from the marketplace restrictions placed on more popular art forms. In 1968, Zap Comix became a youth counterculture platform that showcased the provocative work of cartoonist Robert Crumb, brimming with discomfiting narratives of social despair. There was much in the way of sexual misadventures of the male adolescent variety. The sexual revolution had arrived, but rather than celebrate liberation, the comics depicted a frustrated, maladjusted, and deformed male libido with nowhere to go—a masculine white American body tearing itself apart over its own powerlessness at finding release. The work of Michael O’Donoghue formed a link between the European avantgarde and American black humor, in both literature and cartoons. O’Donoghue’s early writings for experimental theater were influenced by the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (1897–1962), the French theater of extremity that assaulted its audience with onstage Passional Attractions

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gore and sexualized violence. O’Donoghue also acknowledged his early fascination with the writings of Octave Mirbeau (Torture Garden, 1899) and Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” (1938). These manifested in a series of performances O’Donoghue christened “le théâtre de malaise,” mounted by the Rochester, New York, theatrical troupe Bread and Circuses, between 1963 and 1964. The full texts of these plays—The Automation of Caprice, The Twilight of Cookie Lavagetto, and Michael Hip and the Pale-Dry Death Machine—were eventually published in Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review, home to Beckett, Burroughs, Genet, and Sontag in 1964 and 1965. The last of O’Donoghue’s plays performed by Bread and Circuses was a dark, one-act “satirical revue” of the media frenzy that followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy, produced a mere two months after the president’s death. Taking the form of mock news reports, The Death of JFK employed black humor as a means of sending up the hysterical nature of American culture in the wake of the tragedy. It includes such moments as the reporting of a prank gone wrong, when a nineyear-old boy in Indiana places a telephone call to his school, threatening to assassinate President Johnson. A mob of two thousand Hoosiers descend upon the boy and hang him from the flagpole of the local courthouse, after which they cut him down and burn his corpse. O’Donoghue’s “Paris in the Twenties,” subtitled “Somewhere over the Rimbaud or Rule Bretonia!,” published in the September 1965 issue of the Evergreen Review, was a short text that recast European avant-garde intellectuals in a farcical romp brimming with sex, violence, and name-dropping. Montmartre was scandalized! Erik Satie had rented the Kleber Conservatoire to premiere his latest composition; scored for “La Jazzband,” cello, harpsichord, Hispano-Suiza (a touring car the size of a locomotive), and continuo. All went smoothly until the musician playing the Hispano-Suiza missed a corner, roared down the apron and plunged into the audience. Perhaps 20 persons were killed. I really can’t be sure (among them: the Duchese d’Audiffret-Pasquier, Comtesse de Noailles, Princesse Phillippe de Caraman-Chimay). We were so convulsed in laughter at this “unexpected turn” of events that no one even noticed Chaim Soutine slip away. You can imagine our surprise when he appeared stark naked on stage and commenced urinating on the dead and dying, quipping: “i piss on your middle-class moralities!!!” The crowd, already surly, took immediate offense to this. Fistfights broke out. Bombs were detonated. We considered the evening an unqualified success and discreetly retired to “Le Boeuf sur le Toit” for a few rounds of Pernod.15

In a tone that both mimics and mocks upper-class intellectual cocktail banter, O’Donoghue’s stylistic voice balances both a love for the transgressions of a bygone era and a disdain for how the avant-garde has been co-opted by an elite pretending to have been present at the inception of artistic revolt. Using the revolutionary persona as a vessel of 183

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florid repartee, the notion of scandale becomes a punch line. O’Donoghue was a master of using black humor as a device to turn his subjects against themselves. “Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor,” he is quoted as saying,16 and indeed his brand of humor serves a metafunction similar to that of Swift’s “Modest Proposal”—the narrator assumes the voice of the satirical target. That “Paris in the Twenties” appeared in the pages of the Evergreen Review, respected home of the cutting-edge literary avant-garde of the period, was all the more telling. O’Donoghue was addressing the cognoscenti, among whose number he counted himself. As a member of the chain-smoking, scandalizing intellectuals of the day, O’Donoghue had it both ways—as a larger project to come would prove. From 1964 to 1967, there appeared in the Evergreen Review a regular satire of the comic book adventure genre and the misogynistic men’s pulp adventure magazines popular in the 1950s and 1960s (such as Cavalier, For Men Only, Stag, and Swank), which had eventually lost their popularity in the mid-1960s as cultural mores shifted. Written by O’Donoghue and illustrated by veteran cartoonist Frank Springer, The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist can be read as both misogyny and a satire of misogyny, as its storylines risk a retread of the exploitive stories that appeared in the men’s magazines; those narrative staples involved women in extreme distress, invariably abused, tortured, and raped by Nazis and Communists. However, another influence was present during the creation of Phoebe. As a disciple of Terry Southern, O’Donoghue acknowledged the impact of Southern’s 1958 satirical novel Flash and Filigree, stating that it “gave me permission to be a writer.”17 Phoebe Zeit-Geist is a tale partly inspired by Southern and Hoffenberg’s Candy, in which a preyed-upon young woman was depicted in distress to ground the cultural satire in the novel. Candy was also a satire of erotic literature and the absurd mise-en-scène in which women are placed in that genre in order to satisfy the fetishistic sexual fantasies of men. In Phoebe, the titular upper-class heroine/martyr is put through all manner of compromising and sadistic scenarios, including abuse at the hands of a Nazi, a mad rabbi, a blind Zen archer, a band of debauched midwestern businessmen, a crazed fungologist, an Eskimo cult, two preening queer submariners, a Brazilian shoe fetishist, a Marxist sanitation department employee, a Chinese Communist, a twelvefoot-long Komodo dragon, a crazed tattoo artist, Norman Mailer, and a band of angry lesbians. Told in serialized format from issue to issue, the narrative recalls the episodic structure of Candy and that of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), which also offered up the image of a woman who is systematically victimized by perverse sexual predators. Appearing as the women’s liberation movement was making progress in the United States, The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist was anything but a reflection of the actual zeitgeist, it seems. Phoebe is not so much a liberated woman as a survivor of every known assault and humiliation possible, including death, all of them inflicted by Passional Attractions

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Michael O’Donoghue. As she remains unclothed throughout the entire narrative, with barely any dialogue or initiative, Phoebe—described as a “tempest-tossed waif, dupe of destiny, winsome pawn of the warped, the unhinged, the perverse”—is a character both literally and figuratively stripped down to nothing.18 She functions solely as an object around which O’Donoghue performs his narrative gymnastics. Woven throughout is an indifferent cosmic cruelty, as events unfold according to the arbitrary laws of nature—in this case created by O’Donoghue’s pen. The form of the story and the parody of the genre on which it is based are of paramount importance. In a telling moment, Phoebe is confronted by a malicious Norman Mailer (see color plate 13), who declares his intention, in classic moustache-twirling, serial-villain fashion, to “tie you to the railway tracks, whereupon you’ll be mashed by a speeding locomotive!” When Phoebe asks, “Why? What have I ever done to you?,” Mailer replies, “Poor child! Be not so naive as to believe that cruelty and violence must necessarily be motivated! The malicious act, set apart from the commonplace, lackluster treadmill of goal oriented drives, attains a certain purity of its own being!” As in “Paris in the Twenties,” the language on display in Phoebe is the key to its humor, matched by Frank Springer’s adherence to the conventions of cartooning. The melodramatic is played for all it is worth in each situation. Phoebe is an exercise in bad taste dressed up in erudition and linguistic grace, as every panel and speech bubble brims with excessively tasteful jargon, tongue firmly in cheek. O’Donoghue’s balancing of the comic and the cruel took pulp clichés and used them to trespass in the pages of a pedigreed publication in a strategic collision of high and low. This would become O’Donoghue’s métier as he injected black humor into mainstream American culture by way of National Lampoon magazine from 1970 to 1975, and then as the first head writer for Saturday Night Live from 1975 to 1978, for which he essayed the role of the psychotic “Mr. Mike.” With Phoebe, O’Donoghue relinquished the pursuit of “high art” in exchange for infiltrating the broader culture using more popular media forms. American art of the 1960s used the vernacular language of cartooning and advertising to construct ironic commentaries on national identity. Andy Warhol repurposed the commercial printing method of serigraphy, allowing for image repetition and the means of manipulating the “decay” of the picture. In addition to his iconic celebrity works, from 1962 to 1967 Warhol focused on reproducing images of suicides, car crashes, accidental deaths, electric chairs, and race riots. Using black-and-white newspaper and tabloid photographs, he deliberately degraded the image quality, pointing toward Roland Barthes’s observation that the photograph inherently speaks to the catastrophe of death. Methodically training his eye on repetitive representations of death in the United States, Warhol emerged as a black humorist. His work resonated with the terminal impulses of a capitalist apparatus that mass-produced sociopolitical atrocities at an ever-increasing 185

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pace. Warhol’s embrace of mechanical replication represented the all-devouring death drive at the heart of Henry Ford’s assembly line ethos, now fully embraced as Fordism and fueling American imperial dominance. Beginning with his painting 129 Die in Jet! from 1962 (his first “death” work), there was an ironic fatality present in all of Warhol’s output from this period. The work expressed the inevitability of decay and death through an absurd monotony of crushing repetition that reinforced Warhol’s position as a detached observer with a cool, deadpan humor. His unfinished sixty-seven-minute film Since (1966) restaged the JFK assassination as a perverse farce, with the tragic limousine ride repeatedly performed as increasingly profane variations upon a sofa, incorporating numerous conspiracy theories along the way. “Put the top up. Put the top up,” repeats actress Mary Woronov in the role of JFK. The film responded to the numbness that incessant media coverage of the violent event had wrought in the public consciousness. Warhol achieved a glib representation of the American zeitgeist in the 1960s with his Death and Disaster series. In Foot and Tire (1963–64), depicting an outsized truck tire with a human foot pinned beneath it; Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963); Five Deaths Seventeen Times in Black and White (1963); and depictions of the electric chair that had been used to execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, he exposed our cultural morbidity. A Coke bottle was now interchangeable with a device constructed for state-sponsored murder, as they both emerged from the same socioeconomic system. Of the Disaster works, Warhol’s ultimate expression of black humor is Tunafish Disaster (1963), sourced from a Newsweek article concerning an incident in which two Detroit women were fatally poisoned by a can of tainted tuna fish (fig. 10.1). Filmmaker David Cronenberg, in his commentary for the 2006 Warhol exhibition Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962–1964, noted: There is something very tacky and vulgar about it, and that is not hidden. These are snapshots of these two women that the newspaper found wherever they could, as quickly as they could, in order to do their story. . . . And at the same time there’s also something quite humorous about it. It’s a really bizarrely humorous work, I think, and because of that it’s even more horrific than a head-on, serious Disaster work might have been. I think it pointed the way to many elements of what Andy would do later with his Disaster paintings. Repetition of portraits, taken in a nonclassical portrait way . . . the filmic framing . . . and the tension between the first reaction that we might have to the death of another human being and then the sort of cultural distance that we have that provokes humor, philosophy, scandal, and then fear for our own death. In each case, the use of a “disaster” as a hook by a newspaper, or by a tabloid, was also meant to be a cautionary tale. . . . This could happen to you. Be careful that this doesn’t happen to you. This could be your life. Be careful when you eat a tin of tuna. Be careful when you cross the street.19 Passional Attractions

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The juxtaposition of the smiling women with the single can of tuna fish, an unlikely and absurdly benign-looking murder weapon, reproduced as it was in the Newsweek article, is a deadpan gesture. The caption beneath the can, “Seized shipment: Did a leak kill . . . ,” increases the absurdity. It’s a sensationalist tagline, albeit typeset in measured Times Roman, crafted to market the catastrophe. Just as the label on the can is designed to advertise the tuna, the caption is intended to help sell the human-interest angle. Not only do the photographs of the women seem inappropriate to the content of the story, but Warhol’s repeated reproduction of the cheap printing quality is intentionally haphazard. Enlarged to 124 ½ by 83 inches, the work displays a banality that expresses the scrutiny of the black humorist. Nothing is being clearly satirized. Instead, the simple vulgarity and hypocrisy of our cultural penchant Fig. 10.1  Andy Warhol, Tunafish Disaster, 1963. for “death gawking” is exhibited. Silkscreen ink and silver paint on linen, 124 1/2 × 83 inches. Daros Collection, Switzerland. © 2020 The André Breton declared humour noir a Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / “superior revolt of the mind.”20 Its expresLicensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. sion confronts the loss of self and a need to reclaim it amid the negative environmental effects of social, political, and economic malignancy. American black humor from the mid- to late 1960s reflected this loss in absurd and grotesque narratives and in images redolent of imperialist entropy. Black humorists deconstructed moral certitude by avoiding a specific intellectual position and, often, by embracing more juvenile and maladroit forms of expression in order to outrage and shock, refusing any concrete strategy toward social reconciliation. Black humor could be transgression for the sake of transgression, and clarity of intention was not a primary concern. With a detached cosmic nihilism, American black humorists were overwhelmingly white and male, occupying a privileged point of view that complicated the radicalism of their position; they occupied and benefited from the very patriarchal capitalist system whose failures they 187

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sought to expose. Such a position allowed for the freedom of personal revolt, as black humorists sought a liberation of self, but did not propose remedies to cure the social collective. Their nihilistic attitude lay in the fundamental surrealist assertion “that those purposes imposed upon us by society (above all as a result of loyalty to family, nation and church) are false and to be opposed,” as “humor in surrealism is always founded in a refusal of given conditions and as a revolt against whatever is imposed upon us.”21 Out of personal necessity, the black humorist did not align with a faction or participate in protest, choosing instead an individualized means of catharsis for the intellectual liberation of the self that Breton and Vaché postulated. The American black humorists of the 1960s may not have been directly aware of Breton’s humour noir, but there is a lineage of cultural phantoms whispering from one generation to the next, working at the collective artistic consciousness through an accretion of sensibilities. Breton understood that humour noir functions as an honest and unmediated reflecting apparatus and barometer for the time in which one lives, as sociopolitical shifts transpire.

Notes

1. Breton, “Preface to the War Letters,” 336. 2. Vaché, “Letter to André Breton: 4/29/17,” in Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, 297. 3. Quoted in Mark Polizzotti, “Laughter in the Dark,” introduction to Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, ix. 4. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 483. 5. Breton, “Foreword to the 1966 French Edition,” Anthology of Black Humor, xii. 6. Freud, “Der Humor,” 163. 7. Breton, “Lightning Rod,” Anthology of Black Humor, xviii. 8. Haynes, “Persistence of Irony,” 36. 9. Friedman, foreword to Black Humor, viii. 10. Sacks, “Interview: Bruce Jay Friedman,” 150. 11. Winston, “Humour Noir and Black Humor,” 282.

Bibliography

Breton, André, ed. Anthology of Black Humor. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997. ———. “Preface to the War Letters.” In Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism, edited by Franklin Rosemont, 335–37. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2008.

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12. Quoted in Fasteau, “Vietnam and the Cult of Toughness,” 396. 13. Breton, “Foreword to the 1966 French Edition,” Anthology of Black Humor, xii. 14. Quoted in David, Charles Addams, 195. 15. O’Donoghue, “Paris in the Twenties,” 316. 16. Quoted in Perrin, Mr. Mike, 365. 17. Quoted in ibid., 48. 18. O’Donoghue and Springer, Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, unpaginated (roughly one hundred pages into the book). 19. Cronenberg, “David Cronenberg on Andy Warhol.” 20. Quoted Polizzotti, “Laughter in the Dark,” vi. 21. Richardson, “Black Humour,” 207.

Cronenberg, David. “David Cronenberg on Andy Warhol.” Audio commentary from the exhibition Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962–1964, Art Gallery of Ontario, 2006. UbuWeb. http://​ubu​.com​ /sound​/warhol​_cronenberg​.html. David, Linda H. Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life. New York: Random House, 2006.

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Fasteau, Marc. “Vietnam and the Cult of Toughness in American Policy.” In The American Man, edited by Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck, 377–415. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980. Freud, Sigmund. “Der Humor.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 21:159–66. London: Hogarth Press, 1961. Friedman, Bruce Jay. Foreword to Black Humor, edited by Bruce Jay Friedman, vii–xi. New York: Bantam Books, 1965. Haynes, Doug. “The Persistence of Irony: Interfering with Surrealist Black Humor.” Textual Practice 20, no. 1 (2006): 25–47. O’Donoghue, Michael. “Paris in the Twenties.” In Evergreen Review Reader: 1957–1966, edited by Barney Rosset, 314–19. New York: Arcade, 1994.

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O’Donoghue, Michael, and Frank Springer. The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist. New York: Grove Press, 1968. Perrin, Dennis. Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O’Donoghue. New York: Avon Books, 1999. Polizzotti, Mark. Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Richardson, Michael. “Black Humour.” In Surrealism: Key Concepts, edited by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson, 207–16. London: Routledge, 2016. Sacks, Mike. “Interview: Bruce Jay Friedman.” In Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers, 148–71. New York: Penguin, 2015. Winston, Mathew. “Humour Noir and Black Humor.” In Veins of Humor, edited by Harry Levin, 278–82. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.

A Useful Bile

Oz Magazine and British Counterculture

A Case Study in the Reception of Surrealism David Hopkins

11.

In late August 1969, Britain hosted one of the last great rock festivals of the 1960s, the Isle of Wight Festival. Among the things passed from hand to hand at this event were copies of issue number 23 of the notorious “underground” magazine Oz. Themed as “Homosexual Oz,” and reflecting Oz’s mission to undermine “straight society,” the issue showed on its cover a naked Black man embracing a white man (homosexuality had only recently been decriminalized in England, in July 1967, while interracial marriage had been legalized in the United States a month earlier). Flicking through the pages of the magazine, the reader would have come across no fewer than four large reproductions of engravings from Max Ernst’s “collage novel,” La femme 100 têtes (1929), one of them occupying the centerfold.1 Apparently reproduced without permission, they were accompanied by handwritten translations based on a German reprint of Ernst’s publication. On the page facing two of the reproductions was an advertisement from the Julian Press for a book of photographs showing the “variations of

position possible in sexual intercourse” (Oz was largely funded by such advertisements, which, taking advantage of the sexual revolution, were often mildly pornographic, a fact that its founding editor, Richard Neville, justified on the grounds that the politically inflammatory content of the magazine could not have been funded in any other way).2 Elsewhere in the magazine, there was an article by the critic Robert Hughes analyzing the cultural politics of the recent American moon landing. All in all, surrealism (as represented by Max Ernst) was situated here as part of an alternative youth culture intent on celebrating sex and criticizing the regulatory norms of capitalist society. The popular assimilation of surrealism was not, of course, confined to the pages of Oz; the movement was percolating far and wide through mass culture—particularly in fashion and advertising—by the later 1960s.3 The large Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition, held at New York’s MoMA in 1968, the catalog of which was

widely available in the United States and Britain, contributed to the dissemination of an informed knowledge of the topic, as did William Rubin’s lavish tome, Dada and Surrealist Art, of 1969.4 But the Ernst-laden issue of Oz, a magazine that was to appear for a total of forty-eight issues from 1967 to 1973, spanning London’s entire countercultural epoch, shows the relatively sophisticated level of identification that was made with surrealism by the youth counterculture of the period. As yet, little serious work has been carried out on the topic of surrealism’s long-term mass cultural diffusion, and no scholarly account exists of Oz’s importance in this process. Academic art historians find it difficult to assimilate such populist artifacts into their accounts, “high/low” cultural distinctions proving surprisingly tenacious, while historians of visual culture tend to prefer objects of study that are less self-consciously aesthetically engaged. Oz is sometimes mentioned in overviews of 1960s graphic design, but with little attention to its avant-garde connections. If, in its heyday, surrealism had preached sexual revolution and a transformation of consciousness, the mobilization of its ideology and imagery in Oz can be seen as a considered attempt to annex its radical credentials to the concerns of 1960s counterculture. It might be objected that even the well-educated and socially concerned youth of the 1960s, which constituted the audience for Oz (the magazine was always a largely middle-class preserve, directed at a relatively affluent audience of “young adults”), had little sense of the intellectual complexities of surrealism and that the movement was part of a cultural mix newly exploited by the culture industry.5 My intention, though, is to consider the “surrealist” dimensions of Oz in some depth and to consider how seriously we should take this popular take-up of a once avant-garde tendency. It is necessary, first of all, to say something about surrealism’s British reception in the years prior to 1967. Surrealism’s official entrée to Britain had been the International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936, while two books, David Gascoyne’s A Short History of Surrealism (1935) and Herbert Read’s edited volume Surrealism (1936), had been instrumental in disseminating the more esoteric aspects of surrealist thought in a culture that, while hardly notable for its embrace of avant-garde tendencies, had produced significant surrealist precursors such as William Blake and Lewis Carroll. In many ways, Britain had produced a watered-down form of surrealism in the later 1930s and 1940s, notably in the “neo-romanticism” of figures such as Paul Nash and Humphrey Jennings. Its British reception in the later 1950s and ’60s had taken a slightly different course. Partly under the impact of American proto-pop figures such as the late surrealist Joseph Cornell and Jasper Johns, and partly under the impact of a revived concern with surrealism’s roots in Dada, especially Duchamp, the London-based Independent Group (1952–55) developed a fascination with machine forms and imagery from mass culture. By the early 1960s, artists like Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Peter Blake, among many others, were producing cool, ironic modes 191

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of “pop art” that relied heavily on the Dada/surrealist legacy. It was this understanding of surrealism that broadly informed the youth culture of the mid-1960s, with Britain’s art schools, as is often noted, providing the cultural background for rock musicians such as John Lennon, Pete Townshend, and Keith Richards. How were the values of surrealism and its visual style imported into the counterculture, and how exactly should we define the character of the latter? It is important initially to separate “counterculture” from “youth culture” in its modish forms and from the rise of the more commercially driven “pop” music, and to stress that it generally assumed a highly combative or derisory attitude toward capitalist mass culture. Commentators generally agree that the countercultural epoch in Britain can be dated from 1965, with the Albert Hall poetry reading of June of that year standing as a symbolic threshold.6 The event brought together an impressive international array of poets, headed by the American Beat guru Allen Ginsberg, but also served as a rallying point for a number of emergent figures in the British avant-garde or “underground” scene, notably the writer and founder of “Project Sigma,” Alexander Trocchi; the alternative bookshop and publishing entrepreneurs Jim Haynes and Barry Miles; and British poets such as Jeff Nuttall, Pete Brown, and Michael Horovitz. A collage text, bearing the unmistakable tone of Ginsberg at his most Blakean, was printed in the program for the event and suggests its euphoric atmosphere: “World declaration hot peace shower. Earth’s grass is free! Cosmic Poetry Visitation accidentally happening carnally. Spontaneous planet-chant Carnival! Mental Cosmonaut poet epiphany, immaculate supranational Poesy insemination.”7 This text also alerts us to aspects of the character of British counterculture. As has often been noted, the cultural revolution in question began as one of mental attitudes rather than hard politics. In Britain, political dissent in the 1950s had largely centered around the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but disillusionment with the British Left in the early 1960s led to a situation in which, according to two early 1970s commentators, “the gloomy earnestness of the ‘protest’ mentality is displaced by a new ‘tough’ frivolity and creative lunacy. . . . The debate is no longer between Right Wing / Left Wing, but rather between the oppressions of the external world and the desire for internal liberation.”8 By 1967, the increasing emphasis on inner exploration had crystallized into the so-called psychedelic phase of British counterculture. In terms of the cultural style of this period, Jonathan Harris draws attention to the eclecticism involved: “Psychedelia as socio-cultural style . . . is partly a matter of highly eclectic borrowings and restorations: art nouveau decorativeness from Aubrey Beardsley and William Morris, Victorian and Edwardian tailoring, drug-assisted cultural dissidence from sundry Beatniks and Surrealists and Romantic poets and William Blake before them, mock-medieval spiritualism courtesy of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy and Alastair Crowley’s celtic covens.”9 It is revealing that Harris lumps “sundry Beatniks and Surrealists” together here, since Passional Attractions

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one of the central avenues by which surrealist thought entered British counterculture was the poetry of the likes of Allen Ginsberg, the presiding presence at the Albert Hall poetry event. Ginsberg’s generalized understanding of Rimbaud and Verlaine and their later reverberations in the poetry of Breton and other surrealists had a massive impact on younger British poets. Similarly, Alexander Trocchi’s bohemian lifestyle in Paris during the 1950s, when he had known Guy Debord and absorbed the principles of both Dada and surrealism via Lettrism and the Situationist International, made Trocchi the conduit for a politicized sense of the classic avant-garde formations.10 By the mid-1960s, translations of Breton’s manifestoes and of the surrealist poets were in any case available in Britain and were hungrily consumed by the intellectual cognoscenti of the counterculture, alongside Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Wilhelm Reich, R. D. Laing, Herbert Marcuse, Guy Debord, and Raoul Vaneigem.11 This rich mélange of cultural sources was combined with a broad libertarian politics, and in the wake of the May 1968 events in Paris, the character of the counterculture in Britain shifted markedly. The art historian Andrew Wilson notes that events such as the occupation of the London School of Economics in 1967, along with opposition to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, brought the “counterculture” up against the politics of the New Left. The “theatre of an exploration of inner space” was gradually abandoned in favor of an idiosyncratic mix of political and esoteric concerns on the part of the “alternative society.” Wilson’s list of the “bewildering” range of causes at issue is useful: black power and the campaign for racial equality; the personal explorations prescribed by drug culture as well as the struggle for sexual liberation with the rise of feminism and the gay liberation movement; the fight against censorship and obscenity laws . . . other liberation movements for which Che Guevara had become an icon and which became polarized around protests against the different struggles in Vietnam, South Africa and Northern Ireland; alternative living, from communes to the squatting movements, from ecology to new age mysticism, vegetarianism, ley lines and the quest for Atlantis.12

In a few years, and by 1973 at the latest, it was clear that British counterculture was a spent force, although its societal effects were to be far-reaching. As David Widgery observed in the final edition of Oz, “The truth of the matter is not that the leaders-sold-out . . . but that the underground got smashed, good and proper by those forces of which it stood in defiance. It was smashed because it could not, by 1968, be laughed at or ridiculed or patronised any longer.”13 Widgery’s allusion to the smashing of the counterculture no doubt refers to the attempts by the legal establishment in Britain to crack down on “underground” publications in the late ’60s, the notorious obscenity case against Oz being one of the central 193

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events. Oz in many ways represents the pinnacle of British mass-circulation countercultural publishing, acting as a glossier and more visually striking sister magazine to the newspaper-format International Times, which had been formed in 1966, and dealing with all of the issues listed by Wilson. Before saying more about Oz’s famous wrangles with the British judiciary, though, it is worth establishing something of its background, and the way that surrealism is germane to its story. Oz had begun life, as its title implies, in Australia—in Sydney, to be exact—under the editorship of Richard Neville, Martin Sharp, Richard Walsh, and, in the early days, Peter Grose. The magazine was published in Sydney for forty-one issues until 1969 (overlapping, therefore, with the London-based version). The content of the Australian version was largely satirical, drawing heavily on the format of the populist British satirical magazine Private Eye, although on occasion its reportage was distinctly edgy, as in its exposés of Sydney’s criminal underworld. It was also deemed “obscene” by the authorities, and its editors were put on trial twice in 1964. Although found guilty and given short prison sentences on the second occasion, they were released on appeal, setting a precedent for what happened more scandalously six years later in London. Although the Australian Oz’s covers often sported Private Eye–style cartoons or photographs of politicians with amusing quotation bubbles attached, one or two covers already reflected Martin Sharp’s surrealist interests. The cover of issue number 10 (1964), for instance, was a blown-up version of a nostalgic Victorian engraving of a young boy in a sailor suit holding a toy boat (the caption beneath it was a quotation from Time magazine about Australia’s attempts to “bolster its tiny fleet”). Sharp’s surrealist harnessing of appropriated imagery, discussed below, drew on a notable climate of interest in surrealism in Australia that had been underway since the late 1930s.14 Indeed, out of the remarkable group of young Australians who, like Neville and Sharp, gravitated to London in the 1960s—the writer Germaine Greer, the art critic Robert Hughes, the literary critic Clive James, and the satirist Barry Humphries—and whose paths often crossed (occasionally in the pages of Oz), both Hughes and Humphries were well acquainted with surrealism, the latter having been responsible for staging notorious “neo-Dada” performances and exhibitions in Australia in the mid-1950s.15 In his memoir of the Oz years, Neville recalls one of his associates from his early days in London, the aforementioned David Widgery, reciting “rousing extracts from André Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto—the dictation of thought, free from any control by the reason. . . . Describing himself as a ‘libertarian Trot,’ his outfit was downmarket stylish.”16 For Neville, however, the surrealist exploration of the unconscious was soon to become part and parcel of an ideology espousing the liberatory potential of drugs—especially psychedelics—that departs markedly from Breton’s general distrust of drugs.17 (Anaïs Nin would voice a similar attitude toward drugs in an interview with Jim Anderson in Oz number 29 when, discussing dreams, and to the Passional Attractions

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accompaniment of an illustration of a Salvador Dalí nude on the same page, she argued that drugs were not necessarily the gateway to dreams: “In Paris we used to eat cheese before going to bed.”)18 There were other points of contact between Oz magazine, in its early British incarnation, and surrealist ideology. Jean-Jacques Lebel, the son of Robert Lebel (a figure closely involved with Duchamp and Breton), was a member of the postwar surrealist formation in Paris in the late 1950s and a creator of anarchic surrealist-influenced “happenings” in the mid-1960s, who came to the attention of Oz’s editors via his involvement in the May 1968 student uprising.19 Oz was especially receptive in its early London numbers to situationist thought and reported excitedly on the events in Paris.20 Lebel was interviewed by Bryan Willis, on behalf of Oz, a few days before his arrest after the storming of the Odéon in May. Apart from railing against the categorization of people into various groups (“One of the main ways the Capitalist system maintains its control over bodies and minds is by categorising everybody into social groups. They say ‘You’re the workers, you’re the students, you’re the intellectuals’”),21 Lebel discussed art’s immersion in the culture industry, voicing an antiprofessional conception of creativity and an avant-gardist desire for the merging of art and life that reveals his earlier debts to surrealist doctrine: Some painters want to bring their paintings to the factories but that is a completely counter revolutionary attitude. The workers don’t need pseudo avant-garde paintings in the factories they need the total destruction of the social rapport between the bosses and the workers. They have to make their own paintings or invent their own art which will probably not be with brushes and canvases, but an art which will be completely integrated into the life process itself. Art can become, when the revolutionary process has demolished a number of mental and social taboos, something completely integrated in daily life.22

The utopian, proto-avant-gardist tone of this statement gives a sense of the countercultural urgency of Oz in this early period of its London existence, when a very real commitment to libertarian politics jostled with psychedelic content in the magazine. The London-based version of the magazine had first been published by Neville, with Sharp as art editor and Jon Goodchild as designer, in February 1967. Its first two issues were fairly conventional in style and content, but by issue number 3, Sharp’s remarkable artistic skills had begun to come to the fore, and its cover—in shocking pink, blue, and purple and sporting the Mona Lisa, joint in hand, flanked by two preposterous half-peeled bananas—signaled the magazine’s allegiance to the growing taste for psychedelia. Inside this issue, there was an eight-page card insert titled “An Address to Politicians,” in which, alongside Robert Whitaker’s Dada-esque photomontage of a naked woman on a toilet with its waste pipe seemingly emptying into London’s Houses of Parliament, Britain’s 195

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political establishment was roundly abused: “You waffle in abstract generalities about peace, love, freedom, you’re bewildered by your daughter’s hatred. . . . Your son is on pot. He can’t follow the quibbling legalisms of the ’54 Geneva Accords but he knows that thousands of Vietnamese kids are frying to death and you sit at breakfast dribbling marmalade.” Over the next couple of years, Oz continued to provoke, but its provocations were often as much visual as textual. In fact, most commentators tend to agree that Oz’s cultural significance lay not so much in its articles, which were of variable quality, as in its visual ingenuity. Comparing Oz with its main British rival, the International Times, one commentator noted, “When those early ITs came out they looked awful, the end of an era. But when Oz came out, which was printed on litho and designed by Martin Sharp on white cartridge paper with beautiful thick black lines and bright red ink and a huge pair of lips on the front, it was like the sun had come out. . . . You could see the possibilities of print. . . . IT was content, whereas Oz was form.”23 Several of the early issues were highly original in conception. Issue number 5 consisted solely of a large poster containing multiple images of naked young hippie women with flowers in their hair (titled “Plant a Flower Child Today”) that had to be unfolded. The cover of number 11, which was printed in Day-Glo red, green, and yellow versions, consisted of a perforated sheet of gummed labels containing enigmatic slogans (such as lines from R. D. Laing’s Politics of Experience parodying an Auden poem: “If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, / If I could tell you, I would let you know”),24 while the “Tax Dodge Special” of May 1968, a “fun and games” issue, contained massive fold-out sheets bearing Buddhist mandalas converted into board games. Early Oz numbers experimented freely with newly available paper stocks and inks, ranging from the expensively produced number 4 of June 1967, with a gatefold psychedelic cover printed in gold by the London design team Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English and Nigel Waymouth), to smaller, newspaper-style issues, such as numbers 18 and 20, printed on low-grade paper. Such variations were partly the product of fluctuating financial considerations and partly due to the fact that the editorial team found it difficult to retain any one printer for long, with several objecting to the content of the magazine. Felix Dennis, Oz’s art director after Sharp, once estimated that Oz had been through twenty-six printers in forty-two issues.25 By far the most provocative issue of the magazine (though its contents were no more risqué than most others), the “School Kids” issue (number 28) of May 1970, came about through Neville’s conviction, voiced in issue 26, that he and his fellow editors were becoming “old and boring” and from his offer to hand over the editorship of the next issue to volunteers under the age of eighteen (see color plate 14). By this time, Neville had invited Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis to join him as editors, and Neville, preoccupied by administrative tasks, left them to oversee a group of schoolchildren in designing the Passional Attractions

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issue. One of the children, fifteen-year-old Vivian Berger, produced the now-famous appropriation of a scurrilous “Gipsy Granny” cartoon strip by the American underground artist Robert Crumb, in which the head of Rupert Bear, the hero of a Daily Telegraph cartoon strip for children, is collaged onto that of a figure with an enormous penis. Discovering that Granny is a virgin, Rupert charges her at high speed, jumps onto her, and deflowers her in a bloody finale to the strip. The cover of the “School Kids” issue was no less overt. Appropriated from the French publication Dessins érotiques, it bore, in its full wrap-around version (i.e., on both the front and back covers), eight stylized drawings of a naked Black woman, fetishizing the body of the “other” in ways that would now be highly questionable. As Jonathon Green explains, “There is a dildo laced around one, a vibrator poised at the anus of another, a third grasps severed male genitals, a fourth has a tail—a rat? a lizard?—protruding from her vagina, one kisses another one’s breast, another enjoys her partner’s cunnilingual tongue.”26 While the visual effect is perhaps less startling than this description suggests—the image of cunnilingus was obscured by the last-minute addition of a photograph of one of the magazine’s youthful editors—the magazine eventually caught the attention of the police. On August 18, 1970, the editors were arrested, as they had been in Sydney, for publishing an obscene magazine. There followed a period in which various “friends of Oz” campaigned on their behalf (including John Lennon, whose specially convened “Elastic Oz Band” recorded a single titled “God Save Oz”—later changed to “God Save Us”). Finally, when the prosecution resurrected the archaic charge of “corrupting public morals,” the editors were put on trial on the charge that they had “conspired with . . . certain other young persons to produce a magazine containing diverse obscene, lewd and indecent and sexually perverted articles . . . and illustrations with intent thereby to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and young persons within the Realm and to arouse and implant in their minds lustful and perverted desires.”27 The trial, which garnered considerable press attention, lasted from June to November 1971. The editors were found guilty and sentenced to a punitive combination of deportation, prison sentences, and fines, but after an appeal hearing the conviction was quashed on the grounds that more than seventy procedural errors had occurred in the summing up of the trial judge, Mr. Justice Argyle. The whole affair was surrounded by confusion—many people failed to appreciate that school kids themselves had produced the issue (albeit under the guidance of adults)—but, all in all, it confirmed the gulf between the establishment and the youthful counterculture. The tale of Oz’s legal tussles is slightly outside the concerns of this essay and need not detain us any longer.28 No doubt the level of public scandal drummed up by the “School Kids” issue would have impressed the surrealists, but to gain a greater sense of the surrealist movement’s legacy within Oz, we need to look more closely at the artistic 197

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contribution of Martin Sharp (1942–2013) in the publication’s first two years in London.29 Sharp, who is now considered one of Australia’s foremost pop artists, had little to do with the magazine after late 1969, when he left Britain to return to Sydney. By the time of the “School Kids” issue (May 1970), Felix Dennis had taken over the art direction of Oz and some falling off in standards can be discerned. Whereas Oz’s circulation at the height of the obscenity trial had briefly risen to eighty thousand copies, its popularity declined afterward to the extent that by the last issue, number 48, it had “no readership worth the name.”30 In many ways, therefore, Sharp’s contribution is synonymous with the magazine at its best. Sharp’s surrealism falls into two categories. First of all, he developed a cartoonish surrealism, which has an overt “pop” element. As already noted, pop art was arguably the main conduit by which surrealist imagery continued into the late 1960s, but surrealism itself had absorbed cartoon idioms; one thinks of Dalí’s collaboration with Disney on Destino in the mid-1940s, or some of Max Ernst’s self-parodying works of the later 1940s, in which the biomorphic distortions of surrealism register the rise of Disney animation. This idiom was best suited to Sharp’s elaborate cartoons, which graced a number of London Oz issues. André Breton appears in the corner of one of these, on the back cover of Oz number 3 (May 1967), with a bubble issuing from his mouth spouting the dictum “only the Marvellous is beautiful and only the beautiful is Marvellous.” Elsewhere in the issue, there is a more outlandish graphic image of multiple eyes on stalks, titled “What Beautiful Eyes She Has.” There is a clear psychedelic component in the latter image, registering Sharp’s own experimentation with drugs in this period.31 However, whereas Neville discerned a marked shift from social satire to psychedelia in Sharp’s work precisely around the time of this third issue of Oz in mid-1967, it seems likely that Sharp had already developed such imagery in a back-cover drawing for one of the Australian Oz numbers (number 31, 1966), a peculiar advertisement for “Binkies Beef Burgers,” in which biomorphic surrealism is cross-fertilized with a children’s illustration.32 This style owes something to the extreme liberties that Picasso took with anatomy (for instance, in “Une Anatomie,” published in the first issue of Minotaure in 1933) and something to artists of the period such as Paolozzi. As Rick Poynor has noted, the imagery of the “Binkies” advertisement directly informed the cover of the “Magic Theatre” issue of Oz—to be discussed shortly—in which we find the same “surreal, tubular, treelike form with two eyes for stalks and a sinister grinning mouth,” but, as already explained, the eyes-onstalks figure in Oz number 3 and the grinning mouth had appeared on the cover of the first London Oz in 1967. Sharp would exploit this style in some of the more commercial areas of his later 1960s design practice—for instance, on the covers for two of rock group Cream’s LPs, Disraeli Gears (1967) and Wheels of Fire (1968), in which art nouveau graphic embellishments and collage fragments also figure. Passional Attractions

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The second strand of surrealism discernible in Sharp’s practice, which is arguably more subversive, relies on techniques of collage and appropriation. A particular dialogue with the work of Max Ernst, an artist Sharp greatly admired, can be found in such works. Sharp’s first spectacular wholesale appropriation of Ernst occurred not in Oz itself but in a poster on metallic foil card of 1967, in which a bird-gangster, in the act of stabbing an apparently floating or falling naked woman through the foot (from the fourth book of Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté of 1934), was lifted in its entirety from its source, considerably blown up in scale, and reproduced as a shimmering silver, blue, and pink poster with a silver band across the bottom paying homage to “Max the Birdman Ernst” (see color plate 15). Along with another collage portrait of Bob Dylan, titled Blowing in the Mind, also printed on foil, it was printed by Big O Posters in London and became one of a handful of iconic British psychedelic posters of the mid-1960s, on a par with work by North American West Coast poster artists such as Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson.33 Arguably, the sardonic, surrealist-inspired edge of Sharp’s work sets it apart from the softer forms of psychedelic poster art produced in London in the mid-1960s by the likes of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, who, as already noted, also designed covers for Oz.34 Interestingly, another painted version of Sharp’s Une semaine de bonté appropriation would find its way into one of the key cultural expressions of the late ’60s London counterculture, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s film Performance (1970), in which it appears fleetingly in the background of a scene in which the Pherber character (Anita Pallenberg) sets out to pick mushrooms in the greenhouse.35 Sharp found it difficult to resist making use of Ernst after this. Another image from one of Ernst’s collage novels graced the cover of Oz number 9 (February 1968), which a preoccupied Neville had apparently left Sharp and Goodchild to design, only to be appalled when he discovered that they had filled the magazine with flying saucers, turning it into a “UFO issue” (“‘how can you indulge your intergalactic fantasies,’ I asked Sharp, ‘when Asia is a bloodbath’”).36 For the cover, Sharp appropriated an entire image from the fourth chapter of Ernst’s La femme 100 têtes, adding brown accents to selected areas. A further example of such shameless plundering, from the same collage novel, occurred in the four images reproduced in the “Homosexual Oz” issue of August 1969, discussed at the beginning of this chapter. A question might be raised regarding Sharp’s originality and whether he achieved any critical distance from his sources. I would argue, though, that his practice of appropriation follows the principle of the readymade, which was fundamental to Dada and surrealism; the postmodern recontextualization of surrealist imagery in the context of mid-1960s drug culture was obviously a pertinent move. Sharp’s collage-based surrealist contributions to Oz would be far more elaborate in the celebrated “Magic Theatre” issue of November 1968. Neville recalled how Sharp single-handedly took charge of this issue, 199

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turning it into a visual artwork rather than the expected collection of articles: “He worked night after night . . . along with the Melbourne artist and filmmaker Philippe Mora. . . . The issue evolved into a forty-eight page rush-hour of imagery, a cosmic conglomeration collaged from comics, headlines, art books, ads, Playmate Centrefolds [sic] . . . each page textured with multi levels of meaning.”37 The Australian art critic Robert Hughes, who, as noted earlier, was well acquainted with Neville and occasionally wrote for Oz in its early days, regarded the issue as a masterpiece of countercultural graphics. In a lengthy letter defending the issue from the criticism of subscribers who felt shortchanged by such experimentation, he described it as an extended application of an artistic principle “which has been central to modern art since John Heartfield and Max Ernst developed collage fifty years ago. . . . In the ‘Magic Theatre’ Sharp has assembled one of the richest banks of images that has ever appeared in a magazine. . . . I find myself prepared to ignore the gaucheries, the illiterate Sharp spelling, the word balloons that sometimes read as if they were written by André Breton’s bastard child out of Grandma Moses. . . . The ‘Magic Theatre’ issue of Oz (is) the only first class issue of Oz in the last sixteen. . . . At last a magazine has broken the mould in a lyrical and decisive way.”38 Arguably, the “Magic Theatre” issue is more Dada than surrealist. The cover is “surrealist” enough, with its image of sprouting eyes and disembodied grinning mouth, but inside, although there are fragments of reproductions of Ernst and Magritte paintings, these are jostled by disturbing shards of contemporary imagery so that, as Hughes suggested, Heartfield and the Berlin photomonteurs spring to mind as the more immediate models. As Richard Neville noted, Sharp’s exuberant page-by-page inventory of collage fragments seemed to represent a “cosmic conglomeration”: “Primitive Man to President Nixon, Middle Earth to Outer Space, Hitler to Buddha, Crumb to Christ . . . Malcolm X, Elizabeth II, Pius XII, Magritte, Magog . . . Dada, famine victims, fashion victims, war and peace.”39 Much as this issue of Oz made its mark in the history of underground graphic design, it is debatable how well it stands up against its precedents in avant-garde culture. Questions relating to the popularization of “high culture” techniques and iconographies emerge from some of the recent scholarship on surrealism and postwar visual culture. Gavin Parkinson, for instance, has examined the relationship between surrealism and French and Anglo-American science fiction literature, juxtaposing a Richard M. Powers book cover for a 1956 Arthur C. Clarke novel with its source in the paintings of Tanguy.40 While questions of aesthetic comparison are not especially significant for Parkinson, he does at one point note that, whatever its effects on commercial culture, surrealist art had itself been virtually consigned to the category of “kitsch” in Clement Greenberg’s account of modernism.41 By this token, any worries we might have about the leveling out of aesthetic standards between surrealism and its offshoots in mass culture would be Passional Attractions

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beside the point. The issue becomes more interesting if the mass-cultural materials in question can actually be deemed countercultural, since in opposing mainstream cultural values, they presumably continue a project that the surrealists would have endorsed. Surrealism, as its theoreticians constantly emphasized, was primarily concerned not with aesthetics but with changing life. Rather than worrying, then, about the extent to which Oz graphics appropriate and recycle surrealist devices, a more pertinent question might be: how well does Oz as a whole match up to the larger ethical and political legacy of surrealism? Politically, as we have seen, Oz in its early days not only absorbed the energies of the London counterculture but supported the Paris situationists and was particularly sympathetic to the American yippies (Youth International Party), a radical anarchistic and anti-authoritarian group whose membership included Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Distrustful of the dour politics of the traditional Left, Oz’s editors espoused a politics of eros and play. In his book Play Power of 1970 (a hastily written summa of the “underground” philosophy informing Oz), Richard Neville would ask, “How can Hippies be attracted to the idea of ‘radicalizing’ the trade unions when the implicit goal—higher wages—seems obsolete to them?”42 Opposing, as the surrealists had, the ideology of “work,” Neville drew a direct parallel between the surrealists’ play with indeterminacy and the turn toward a “playful” politics in the underground: “The principle of indeterminacy is endemic in the underground . . . derived like so many other inspirations from Dada and Surrealism (cf nudity, hoaxes, toys, satirical uniforms and laughter). Just as their anti-art antics were an attempt to go beyond art, so the anti-ideological anti-politics of the Situationists/ Yippies attempt to go beyond politics.”43 Later on, he gives explicit examples of what he has in mind: “The politics of play. The strategy which converts the Underground to a brotherhood of clowns. . . . In Nanterre it’s a horse nominated by students for local councillor. . . . In Detroit it’s yippies seeking an official permit to blow up General Motors. . . . In Paris, it’s a mass shoplifting raid on an exclusive grocery and free distribution to nearby slum dwellers of caviar.”44 As already shown, the politics of play espoused by Oz also extended to asserting the rights of schoolchildren, as is shown, symbolically, by the decision to hand over to them the editorship of the “School Kids” issue, and also the publication of a “Draft Charter of Children’s Rights,” which occupied the centerfold of the “Dream Power” issue of Oz.45 While such attitudes tied in with the deschooling movement of the 1960s (Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society of 1971 being a key text), attention to the liberalization of childhood echoes a distinct strand of surrealist thought. André Breton had shifted his allegiance from Marx to the utopian socialist Charles Fourier in the postwar years, to the extent that the last major surrealist exhibition in Paris under Breton’s aegis (he died in 1966), the Absolute Deviation show of 1965–66, took its starting point from Fourier.46 Fourier’s 201

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ideas on “passionate attraction” as the guiding principle in an elaborately conceived social system were the key sources of Breton’s interest in him. Children had played a central role in Fourier’s notion of the “phalanstere,” and Breton, who had asserted long before, in the first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” that “the mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood,” had duly acknowledged this in his late poem “Ode to Charles Fourier,” fondly quoting one of the eccentric sections in which Fourier talks about the system of awards envisioned for child workers.47 Oz’s editors were probably unaware of such esoteric connections, but Fourier’s ideas were broadly familiar, as he was one of the principal advocates of the “libidinal work” discussed by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (1955), a counterculture bible.48 There is thus an overlap of attitudes here between Oz and the surrealists, with the Fourier-Marcuse conception of eros at its heart. A line might in fact be drawn between the “School Kids” issue of Oz—the fulcrum for the British establishment’s vilification of the counterculture—and utopian attitudes toward childhood central to late surrealist thought. It is not surprising, perhaps, that Oz also inherited some rather questionable attitudes toward child sexuality from the surrealist tradition. In the “School Kids” issue, there is an amusing skit on the idea of the naked “Playmate of the Month” and its tabloid variants in the image of a (clothed) young schoolgirl that is captioned “Jailbait of the Month.” The caption obliquely raises the issue of the legality of sex with underage children, which may in fact have been one of the more deeply buried fears underlying the prosecution of the magazine. In other issues of Oz, there are numerous countercultural versions of the femme enfant beloved of the surrealists. In the centerfold of one issue, flooded in fluorescent green, three prepubescent girls are shown sprawled in a sunny glade; in another issue, provocatively placed before and after two letters from headmasters that bemoan the depravity of the earlier “School Kids” issue, are four pages devoted to a set of drawings, signed “Burman,” of young girls wearing fetishistic accoutrements, their genitals exposed.49 Such images, apart from raising uncomfortable questions about pedophilic fantasy, serve to underline the heterosexual male-centeredness of the concept of “sexual liberation” on offer in the magazine. Given this straight male emphasis, it is important to realize that the magazine was simultaneously one of the earliest platforms for the feminist thought of Germaine Greer, an associate of Neville’s from Sydney days, who was one of Oz’s early staff writers. Greer’s contributions could be hilariously satirical. In one article, “The Universal Tonguebath: A Groupie’s Vision,” she purported to talk to “Dr G,” “a celebrated (and overeducated) international groupie” (herself, of course), about the experience of having sex with rock stars.50 But Greer’s attention to a liberated female sexuality, which was more than equal to the liberated sexuality of her male colleagues, could assume a highly polemical form, as in her contribution to the “Female Energy” issue of the magazine, “The Politics of Female Passional Attractions

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Sexuality.” Here, in what has been called a “dry run for The Female Eunuch,” she began by asserting that “one of the chief mechanisms of the suppression of female humanity is the obliteration of female sexuality,” and ended up calling for the reclamation of female sexuality via the overthrow of “the missionary position”: “Once a woman throws her legs over a lover she has accepted responsibility for her own sexuality.”51 Feminist polemics like this show that Oz was receptive to the stirrings of a new gender politics, and it is here in fact that the biggest departure from surrealism can be discerned. Powerful women were not always to the taste of the male surrealists, and it is interesting that Oz occasionally recontextualizes surrealist imagery in order to comment on its blind spots in this respect. In one issue, following an article by David Widgery questioning the male sexism of the counterculture, we find a blown-up detail from a famous Hans Bellmer drawing of Unica Zürn in which Zürn’s face is superimposed over her buttocks and crotch so that her eye doubles with her vagina. In the context of the article, it becomes not so much an image of male/Bataillean fantasy as a demonstration of the assertive female gaze.52 What conclusions should we draw from all this? To what extent was Oz a late practice of surrealism? Martin Sharp’s graphics emerge as possibly the most important cultural contribution of the magazine. Highly appropriative, they contributed to a visual lexicon that the counterculture could adopt as its own, and, during his period as Oz’s artistic director, Sharp plundered surrealism more assiduously than he did art nouveau, Van Gogh, Disney, or any of the other aesthetic idioms that were grist to his mill. It is hard to extract a coherent critique from Sharp’s work, however, and, while implicitly assenting to the subversive implications of appropriation, his images do not particularly extend the Dada/surrealist politics of the strategy. One must look to Oz’s engagement with such groups as the situationists and the yippies, and its interest in the “politics of play,” to see it as functioning as a latter-day surrealism, intent on “transforming life.” Aside from its strong visual impact, Oz’s claims to a changed conception of consciousness largely rested on its espousal of drugs, and this hardly bears comparison with surrealism’s thoroughgoing engagement with Freud, Marx, Sade, et al. At the same time, Oz is significant precisely for the way in which it magnifies some of surrealism’s flaws in mass-cultural terms. The most obvious of these is sexism (although Oz, as we have seen, registered the societal shifts of its time in this respect), but the magazine also represented a popular flowering of surrealism’s incipient orientalism (a continuation, of course, of aspects of romantic and symbolist taste). Although space limitations preclude a discussion of this, Oz, like surrealism, was besotted with alterity; it frequently contained articles on non-Western cultures, although these were invariably points along the “hippie trail.” We might consider the countercultural aspirations of Oz merely regressive. The music critic Charles Shaar Murray, who had been one of the original contributors to the “School Kids” issue, noted in relation to Neville’s Play Power, “It offered cultural 203

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revolution for the materially and socially comfortable . . . the line from hippie to yuppie is not nearly as convoluted as people like to believe. A lot of the old hippie rhetoric could well be co-opted now by the pseudo-libertarian right: get the government off our backs, let individuals do what they want—that translates very smoothly into laissez-faire yuppyism.”53 In this view, Oz simply confirmed Fredric Jameson’s view that surrealism helped create the “pseudo-satisfactions” of late capitalism.54 But Oz’s attack on the 1960s British establishment was not without a real whiff of danger. The magazine challenged conventional morality and contained unsettling visual juxtapositions that acted as directly on its viewers as the imagery of any surrealist predecessor; witness, for instance, Jim Leon’s Necrophilia, an image of a toad-man making love to a female corpse, and assorted toad/women metamophoses in the “Dream Power” issue of the magazine.55 Oz perhaps represents a populist last gasp of surrealism’s urge for disorientation, but to what extent did it bring about the crisis of consciousness surrealism sought? The jury has to be out on this, but mention of juries does remind us that Oz provoked one of the most dramatic moral confrontations of the postwar era—and this on the very grounds on which surrealism was founded: the liberation of desire.

Notes

Personal note: As one who reached the age of twenty-one in 1976 and grew up in Britain with talk of Vietnam, May 1968, and the Oz trial on television, my love of surrealism was fostered in that febrile atmosphere. My elder brother, idealistic and astutely uninvolved with drugs, was a guide and exemplar, although he would never have acknowledged the fact. I dedicate this to the memory of Trevor Hopkins. A longer version of this chapter appears as a section of chapter 6 in my book Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 1. Oz, no. 23 (August 1969): 5, 20, 24–25. 2. For Neville on the sex ads, and a critique of them by Jann Wenner, see Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, 143. 3. For discussion of this process, see the essays in Wood, Surreal Things. 4. For the American reception of Rubin’s show, see Boaden, “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage,” 400–402. 5. For a useful account of the economic expansion of 1960s youth culture, see Laing, “Economy, Society and Culture.” 6. See, for instance, Wilson, “Poetics of Dissent.” 7. “International Poetry Invocation,” printed program note, Royal Albert Hall, London, June 11, 1965, quoted in ibid., 94.

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8. Stansill and Mairowitz, BAMN (By Any Means Necessary), 13. 9. Harris, “Introduction,” 11. 10. On Trocchi in this formative phase, see Wilson, “Poetics of Dissent,” 98–99n7. 11. Possibly the most widely available partial translations of Breton’s manifestoes in mid-1960s Britain were those in Waldberg, Surrealism. Important earlier sources in English were Gascoyne’s Short Survey of Surrealism and Gascoyne’s translation of Breton’s What Is Surrealism? 12. Wilson, “Spontaneous Underground,” 91. 13. Widgery, “What Went Wrong,” 8. 14. See Chapman, “Surrealism in Australia.” 15. Ibid., 216. 16. Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, 73. 17. For discussion of Breton and drugs, see Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 292. 18. Anderson, “Conversations with Anaïs Nin,” 34. 19. For an account of Lebel’s association with the surrealists, along with a detailed account of one of his major happenings, “120 Minutes Dedicated to the Divine Marquis” of 1966 (for which he was arrested on charges that included obscenity, a significant precursor of Oz’s later prosecution), see Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 198–202.

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20. Quattrocchi, “Agit 3” and “Agit 4.” 21. Willis, “Lebel.” 22. Ibid. 23. Pearce Marchbank, quoted in Green, Days in the Life, 152. 24. Laing, Politics of Experience, 156. 25. Dennis, “Felix Dennis, Art Director.” 26. Green, All Dressed Up, 364. 27. The charge is taken from the wording as it appeared on the cover of the January 1971 issue of Oz (no. 32). 28. For a full account of the trial, see Palmer, Trials of Oz. 29. Martin Sharp’s work has received little academic attention to date. See, however, Gunn, “‘A-Changin’ Times.’” 30. Green, All Dressed Up, 376. 31. For an interesting reflection on the aesthetics of psychedelia, see Hickey, “Freaks.” 32. The point is made in Poynor, “Martin Sharp.” 33. For discussions of psychedelic poster art in British and American contexts, see Miles, “At the Edge of Readability”; Tomlinson, “Sign Language.” 34. For Sharp in relation to other British psychedelic artists and designers, see Miles, “At the Edge of Readability,” 109–10 and passim. 35. See Coulthart, “Max (The Birdman) Ernst.” 36. Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, 105. 37. Ibid., 126. 38. Robert Hughes, letter, Oz, no. 17 (December 1968): 12.

39. Neville: Hippie Hippie Shake, 127. 40. Parkinson, Futures of Surrealism, 76–77. See also 69–73, where Parkinson discusses Michel Carrouges’s and Brian Aldiss’s comparisons between science fiction illustration and surrealism. 41. Ibid., 41. 42. Neville, Play Power, 208. 43. Ibid., 55. For surrealist attitudes toward the work/play dialectic, see also Hopkins, “Duchamp, Childhood, Work, and Play.” 44. Neville, Play Power, 227. 45. Oz, no. 36 (July 1971): 26–27. 46. See Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 177–80. For further discussion of Fourier, see Claire Howard’s chapter in this volume. 47. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 39; Breton, Ode à Charles Fourier. See also my discussion of Fourier and childhood in chapter 6 of Dark Toys. 48. For Marcuse on Fourier, see Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation, 174. 49. Oz, no. 27 (April 1970): 24–25; Oz, no. 34 (April 1971): 2–3, 6–7. 50. Greer, “Universal Tonguebath,” 31–32. 51. Greer, “Politics of Female Sexuality,” 10–11. The “dry run” quotation comes from Green, All Dressed Up, 364. 52. Widgery, “Women Are Goddesses,” 46. 53. Charles Shaar Murray, quoted in Green, All Dressed Up, 36. 54. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 95–106. 55. Oz, no. 36 (July 1971): 34–35.

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“An Address to Politicians.” Oz, no. 3 (May 1967): Chapman, 216–301. Canberra: National 13–14. Gallery of Australia, 1993. Anderson, Jim. “Conversations with Anaïs Nin.” Oz, Coulthart, John. “Max (The Birdman) Ernst.” no. 29 (July 1970): 34–35. Feuilleton, May 17, 2009. http://​www​ Boaden, James. “Dada, Surrealism, and Their .johncoulthart​.com​/feuilleton​/2009​/05​/17. Heritage? The North American Reception Dennis, Felix. “Felix Dennis, Art Director of Oz.” of Dada and Surrealism.” In A Companion to Image, no. 6 (1972): unpaginated. Dada and Surrealism, edited by David Hopkins, Gascoyne, David. A Short Survey of Surrealism. 400–415. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. London: Cobden Sanderson, 1935. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).” Green, Jonathon. All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the In Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Counterculture. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 1–48. Ann ———. Days in the Life. London: Heinemann, 1988. Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Greer, Germaine. “The Politics of Female Sexuality.” ———. Ode à Charles Fourier. Paris: Éditions Oz, no. 29 (July 1970): 10–11, 32. Gallimard, 1948. ———. “The Universal Tonguebath: A Groupie’s ———. What Is Surrealism? Translated by David Vision.” Oz, no. 19 (March 1969): 31–33, 47. Gascoyne. London: Faber and Faber, 1936. Grunenberg, Christoph, ed. Summer of Love: Art Chapman, Christopher. “Surrealism in Australia.” of the Psychedelic Era. Rev. ed. London: Tate In Surrealism: Revolution by Night, edited by Publishing, 2005. Michael Lloyd, Ted Gott, and Christopher

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Gunn, Anthea. “‘A-Changin’ Times’: The Art of Martin Sharp in the 1960s.” Journal of Australian Studies 34, no. 2 (2010): 79–93. Harris, Jonathan. “Introduction: Abstraction and Empathy; Psychedelic Distortion and the Meanings of the 1960s.” In Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis, and Counterculture in the 1960s, edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris, 1–17. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Hickey, Dave. “Freaks.” In Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, rev. ed., edited by Christoph Grunenberg, 61–66. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Hopkins, David. Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. ———. “Duchamp, Childhood, Work, and Play: The Vernissage for First Papers of Surrealism, New York, 1942.” Tate Papers 22 (Autumn 2014). https://​www​.tate​.org​.uk​/research​ /publications​/tate​-papers​/22​/duchamp​ -childhood​-work​-and​-play​-the​-vernissage​-for​ -first​-papers​-of​-surrealism​-new​-york​-1942. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: TwentiethCentury Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Laing, Stuart. “Economy, Society, and Culture in 1960s Britain: Contexts and Conditions for Psychedelic Art.” In Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis, and Counterculture in the 1960s, edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris, 19–34. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Mahon, Alyce. Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilisation. 1955. Bungay: Sphere Books, 1969. Miles, Barry. “At the Edge of Readability: The London Psychedelic School.” In Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, rev. ed., edited by Christoph Grunenberg, 99–111. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Neville, Richard. Hippie Hippie Shake: The Dreams, the Trips, the Trials, the Love-Ins, the Screw Ups, the Sixties. London: Duckworth, 2009.

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———. Play Power: Exploring the International Underground. London: Paladin, 1971. Palmer, Tony. The Trials of Oz. Manchester: Blond and Briggs, 1971. Parkinson, Gavin. Futures of Surrealism: Myth, Science Fiction, and Fantastic Art in France, 1936–1969. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Polizzotti, Mark. Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Poynor, Rick. “Martin Sharp: From Satire to Psychedelia.” Design Observer, December 6, 2013. https://​designobserver​.com​/feature​ /martin​-sharp​-from​-satire​-to​-psychedelia​ /38242. Quattrocchi, Angelo. “Agit 3: The May Revolution.” Oz, no. 13 (June 1968): 22–24. ———. “Agit 4: PhilistineTears—Nectar of the Gods.” Oz, no. 13 (June 1968): 25. Stansill, Peter, and David Mairowitz, eds. BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Manifestoes and Ephemera, 1965–70. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Tomlinson, Sally. “Sign Language: Formulating a Psychedelic Vernacular in Sixties’ Poster Art.” In Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, rev. ed., edited by Christoph Grunenberg, 121–34. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Waldberg, Patrick. Surrealism. London: Thames and Hudson, 1965. Widgery, David. “What Went Wrong.” Oz, no. 48 (November 1973): 8–9, 66. ———. “Women Are Goddesses or Sloppy Beasts.” Oz, no. 36 (July 1971): 44–46. Willis, Bryan. “Lebel.” Oz, no. 13 (June 1968): 6. Wilson, Andrew. “A Poetics of Dissent: Notes on a Developing Counterculture in London in the Sixties.” In Art and the Sixties: This Was Tomorrow, edited by Chris Stevens and Katharine Stout, 93–111. London: Tate, 2004. Exhibition catalog. ———. “Spontaneous Underground: An Introduction to London Psychedelic Scenes, 1965–68.” In Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis, and Counterculture in the 1960s, edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris, 63–98. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Wood, Ghislaine, ed. Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design. London: V&A, 2007. Exhibition catalog.

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Surrealism and Punk

The Case of COUM Transmissions Marie Arleth Skov

12.

“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd,” André Breton famously wrote in the 1930 “Second Manifesto of Surrealism.”1 About five decades later, in the 1976 song “Anarchy in the UK,” the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten roared, “I wanna destroy the passerby.”2 Through exaggeration and shock value, both Breton and Rotten pointed to a brutality already present in society. Breton continued, “Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.” Lashing out, running amok, and fantasizing about violence ultimately became images of resistance against an unjust and all-encompassing system. Johnny Rotten’s echo of André Breton is one of many links between surrealism and punk. Though Dada is mentioned more often—thanks to punk impresario Malcolm McLaren’s self-labeling, Jamie Reid’s collages for the Sex Pistols, and Greil Marcus’s analyses in Lipstick Traces (“It was an old dream come true—as if the Sex Pistols . . . had happily rediscovered a formula contrived in 1919, in Berlin, by one Walter Mehring”)3—the links to surrealism are just as significant. There are substantial thematic ties and strategies adapted from surrealism by CoBrA, the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, King Mob, and punk, and several key figures moved between these interconnected groups.4 One discernible example is the paraphernalia sold at Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop SEX in London’s West End, which sold fetish, S&M, and bondage gear, along with T-shirts with slogans from France’s May ’68 and the situationists, such as “Be Reasonable, Demand the Impossible” and “Prenez vos désirs pour la réalité” (Take your desires for reality). The Sex Pistols’ name itself not only borders on the ridiculously Freudian but also invokes surrealist imagery in the clarity of its symbols and its playful juxtaposition of disparate contexts. The artists, poets, and musicians involved in the punk

movement exhibited an interest in (self-)abuse, sickness, and agony, and an instinct for corporeality and performativity. All of this relates to aspects of surrealism. Both surrealism and punk were reactions to a society in crisis. In the wake of World War I, the violent effects and instruments of modern warfare, such as chemical weapons, had shattered illusions of modernity’s progress. Louis Aragon and André Breton both worked at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, where they were confronted with dismembered and traumatized veterans of the war.5 Informed by this personal experience, the surrealists worked to draw attention to the broken state of contemporary society. Taking a stand against authoritarianism, patriotism, and the bigotry of war victory, they saw their work—in poetry and, later, in art—as an attack on the bourgeoisie. Punks likewise saw themselves in opposition to an establishment in denial of reality. The tremendous economic development of the postwar years in western Europe and the United States was ending in the 1970s, and punk emerged as the expression of this new historical situation. The dream of a better future appeared suddenly hollow; quoting again “Anarchy in the UK,” the Sex Pistols spat punks’ rejection of progress: “Your future dream has sure been seen through.” The economic crisis turned into a much broader crisis of confidence: “The decline was seen as having diverse symptoms—not just military and territorial but moral, cultural, spiritual and physical,” writes Andy Beckett in his account of Britain in the 1970s. “The centuries-old British empire was dismantled in a couple of decades.”6 When the epicenter of punk moved from New York to London around 1976, the crisis (and class system) in the UK gave the movement a new energy and tenor. In 1977, responding to Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee celebrations, the Sex Pistols released their sardonic single “God Save the Queen,” with Johnny Rotten screaming out against the queen’s “mad parade” and “fascist regime.” One reason the song was so successful, despite being banned by BBC Radio, was the feeling—among young people, especially—that no one else was saying the obvious: the Jubilee was, in the words of Jon Savage, “a state-reinforced lie: an attempt to pretend nothing was wrong in Rotten Britain.”7 Punk’s taboo breaking drew attention to the double standards of the authorities, the tabloid press (especially Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and scare campaigns), and the superficiality and injustice of capitalist society. The Cold War rhetoric of ideological fabrications stood in stark contrast to the reality of high youth unemployment, insolvent cities, and the resulting clashes between police and squatters. Punk’s staged ugliness and aggression thus exposed what was otherwise concealed. As movements, both punk and surrealism merged the poetic with the political, romance with revolt. In his pioneering 1929 analysis of the surrealist movement, Walter Benjamin wrote that “the cult of evil as a political device, however romantic,” has the ability “to disinfect and isolate.”8 To disinfect by promoting evil; that goes to the heart of the punk movement’s aspirations, too. Passional Attractions

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COUM’s Art: A Magnifying Glass Jon Savage argues that there were three key formations of punk in London in the mid- to late 1970s: the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and COUM Transmissions (COUM) / Throbbing Gristle (TG).9 What they all had in common—despite their differences—was that they did not think that rich, powerful, glamorous London represented the true London. Each in their own way pointed to the city’s poor, violent, downtrodden elements. All three groups worked transdisciplinarily—with language, images, music, performance, and indeed with a lifestyle that expressed punk. Whereas the Sex Pistols were darkly romantic and the Clash were socially conscious, COUM/TG engaged in a more basic exploration of human malice. Starting in 1969, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti formed the core of COUM Transmissions, with other members and collaborators participating in their projects. In 1975, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson joined COUM, and together they produced films, postcard campaigns, body art, and assemblages, and organized exhibitions, happenings, and performances. From 1976 onward, they also appeared—in the same cast, with the addition of Chris Carter—as an industrial band under the name Throbbing Gristle.10 Michael Bracewell calls punk “modernity in extremis.”11 This is the notion of punk as a mannerist exaggeration of a dying modernity, a decadent fin-de-siècle sentiment of the ending twentieth century. COUM’s inclination toward the extreme reflects the disposition of the entire punk movement. Whatever punks did, they overdid. COUM Transmissions was interested in the discrepancy between appearance and reality, including their own faults, fascinations, and fears. “The power of performance art was [that] it could act like a magnifying glass,” Genesis P-Orridge told Jon Savage. “It was the reduction down to the critical moment between being dead and alive. Which is one feels totally alive but also under threat. That is expressed exactly in Punk at the beginning: the same edge.”12 P-Orridge thus emphasized how the art of COUM was an exploration—of oneself and of society; s/he (“s/he” is the pronoun P-Orridge used) looked at art as a push to the limit. Punk artists promoted subversive content to examine topics such as sexuality, pain, fear, and the nature of authority, and this at a time when morality was perceived to be in crisis. As “Sleazy” remarked, “The moral climate became progressively more conservative from the mid-1970s onward.”13 The most distinctive feature of COUM’s work might be the crossing of borders—aesthetic, stylistic, and gendered. The work of the artists involved in COUM/TG is in many ways exemplary of the various connections between surrealism and punk. One such connection is the way in which the group questioned sex, power, and gender with respect to their own bodies and identities. P-Orridge’s Pandrogeny Project, begun in the 1990s, during which s/he and Lady Jaye (née Jacqueline Breyer) gradually began a transition to becoming one being, a third being, speaks to this. As P-Orridge put it in Flash Art in 1978, “I get NO masochistic pleasure from my risks, but I do get the satisfaction of facing up to my fears and relinquishing inherited, and to me false, taboos 209

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and neuroses in a way that offers a system of revelation and education to a percentage of bystanders.”14 COUM/TG was concerned with the use of words, as is apparent in the name transmissions as well as COUM, which could refer to commune, communication, or come/ cum, and is “pronounced coom or come.”15 The association with “cum” was enhanced by the COUM logo, which featured a hand-drawn semierect penis ejaculating. The group saw language as a key means of subversion: language, and more broadly communication, was understood as an instrument of oppression when used by the ruling class. Douglas Rushkoff reconstructs P-Orridge’s line of thought as: “They own the land, the buildings, the money, the media and the sex. But maybe not the language.”16 P-Orridge thus engaged in a kind of reoccupation of the English language, using thee for the, E for I, butter for but, etc. These détournements became part of the “Coumalphabet” that was used in all statements made by the group. The main messages of COUM’s 1974 manifesto concern the work methods and mindset of the artists: “COUM enable all kinds of people to discover their abilities to express ideas through different media. COUM believe that you don’t NEED special training to produce and/or enjoy worthwhile significant and unique works. COUM demonstrate that it has NOT all been done before, and that which has can still bear valid re-interpretation.” The notion of “valid re-interpretation” might hint at their approach to past avant-garde movements, especially Dada and surrealism: COUM orients itself within art history, and reanalyzes or at times reenacts past work and past ideas. However, the way COUM reinterpreted surrealist topoi and motives was often by making the implicit explicit. “COUM explore their own dreams and obsessions,” the manifesto continues, “and live them out where possible.”17 No pretending, no disguise, no art puzzle.

Porno Postcards: Absurd Juxtapositions This mode of making the implicit explicit and being overtly concrete can be seen in a postcard collage that P-Orridge made and sent in 1975. The sending of the postcard resulted in a trial at Highbury Magistrates Court in London, which the artists of COUM subsequently documented in the publication G.P.O. Versus G.P.-O.: A Chronicle of Mail Art on Trial Coumpiled by Genesis P-Orridge and COUM (1976). The charge was sending five postcards of “indecent, offensive, and obscene character” through the mail, thereby violating the Post Office Act of 1953 (G.P.O. versus G.P.-O. stands for General Post Office versus Genesis P-Orridge).18 On the front of one of these postcards was a reproduction of René Magritte’s painting Time Transfixed (1938). P-Orridge cut out an image from a pornographic magazine of

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a couple having intercourse and superimposed it over Magritte’s painting. On the back of the postcard, s/he added text describing sexual intercourse. Over this description ran the words “happy birthdate,” and below, the card was signed “cari saluti, Genesis.” The postcard, dated November 27, 1975, was sent to “dearest Ted,” a made-up artist named Ted Glass with an address on West 14th Street in New York. Around the address line, P-Orridge stamped the words copyright breech in black (breech is most probably a deliberate misspelling of breach as well as one more added obscenity, as breech can also refer to buttocks). The replicated Magritte painting on the postcard shows a steam train exiting a marble fireplace, on top of which are placed two empty candlesticks and a large mirror. In a 1959 letter, Magritte explained the image process: “I decided to paint the image of a locomotive. . . . In order for its mystery to be evoked, another immediately familiar image without mystery—the image of a dining room fireplace—was joined.”19 Through the unexpected juxtaposition of unrelated yet familiar objects, Magritte sought to intrigue the viewer. Furthermore, the train inside the fireplace could be interpreted as a metaphor for penetration. On the postcard, Genesis P-Orridge thus made the latent sexual symbolism of Magritte’s arrangement manifest. There is a meanness in the way Magritte’s painting is exposed to the tastelessness and crudity of both the overlaid image and the cut-out, awkwardly formulated text from the porn magazine: “We bucked and heaved, our mingled juices soaking our groins and also the quilt beneath us,” it reads. P-Orridge’s use of text as an integral part of the work also points to Magritte himself: the declaration and nondeclaration of things may be a reference to his famous painting The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) (1928–29), twisted once again. The juxtaposition of Magritte’s subtle enigma with the crass yet dull reality of (bad) pornography is not without wit. All of the aspects of Magritte’s work are inverted: the metaphor is divulged. Magritte’s juxtaposition of unrelated objects is both continued and undermined in P-Orridge’s absurd new juxtaposition. The incongruous combination of elements in Magritte’s work is expanded to include aspects of the social contexts of art. The relationship between the intimate and the public adds an extra layer of meaning. A postcard is semipersonal, yet semipublic. Depicted or mediated sex is equally semipersonal, yet semipublic. In a written court statement, P-Orridge described mail art as a medium of accessibility, popular culture, and simple technique.20 Given that Magritte’s original painting was commissioned by the collector Edward James, who, impressed by Magritte’s submissions to the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, wanted it for his London home, P-Orridge’s comment can be read as an indirect reproach of Magritte’s exclusivity and closed commissioned work for a rich collector.

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Art as Crime and Crime as Art At the ensuing trial, COUM Transmissions made an event—a show—out of the merging of art and life. Tutti photographed P-Orridge as s/he received the court summons. This photo was included in the opening pages of G.P.O. Versus G.P-O., with an ironic caption specifying the date and time (Saturday, January 17, 1976, 10:00 a.m.), the name and rank of the police detective, and the artist’s address in Hackney, along with the observation that “Genesis had just been woken up and as can be seen, was not looking his best.” COUM sent out formal, wedding-style invitations to the court hearing to all their associates, resulting in an illustrious crowd in attendance. The press was notified, and P-Orridge gave several interviews. At the trial, s/he wore an elaborate outfit, resulting in a visual clash ready for the stage, as noted by Time Out’s Duncan Campbell at the time: “There was the defendant, P-Orridge, resplendent in lurex suit, red socks, silver finger nails and with his hair just growing back on the crown of his head from where he had but recently shaved it. Facing him was the doughty magistrate, Mrs. Colwell, in a twin set that matched her blue eye-shadow.”21 The key witnesses consisted of a string of personalities from the art establishment and the radical avant-garde, including Sir Norman Reid, director of the Tate Gallery; Ted Little, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts; G. M. Forty, director of the Fine Arts Department at the British Council; and American writer William S. Burroughs. Fittingly, Burroughs—whose book Naked Lunch (1959) had once been banned under American obscenity laws—was the one to write in his testimony, “Genesis P.-Orridge is an artist and not a pornographer.”22 In spite of these explanations, the main line of defense by P-Orridge’s lawyers—artistic merit—was judged “irrelevant,” and P-Orridge was fined £100 plus all court costs. After the trial, s/he stated, “I don’t find it the be-all and end-all to use nude ladies on postcards, but I resent the fact I can’t do it,” and added New Scotland Yard to the list of exhibitions on h/er résumé (“h/er” is the pronoun P-Orridge used).23 The degree of staging is reminiscent of how both the Dadaists and the surrealists took on performance and publicity. The mock trial of Maurice Barrès, arranged in 1921 by André Breton, Louis Aragon, Benjamin Péret, and others, comes to mind. Though this was a reverse case—with the artists as defendants, not accusers—the incidents share a sense of absurdity, performance, and a desire for public attention. After the trial, COUM Transmissions engaged in a series of performances at the A.I.R. Gallery in London in July 1976 titled Crime Affirms Existence—High Crime Is Like High Art. In the accompanying article, “Annihilating Reality,” published in Studio International, coauthors P-Orridge and “Sleazy” Christopherson pose the question of murder as a performative act, drawing on the infamous 1827 essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” by Thomas De Quincey. In “Annihilating Reality,” P-Orridge and Christopherson identify with artists and writers who had been on the verge of criminality Passional Attractions

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or were convicted of crimes, including the Marquis de Sade, Hugo Ball, and Vito Acconci. Although the article is fragmentary and sensationalist, P-Orridge and Christopherson poignantly assert that in the perception of art, like that of crime, the values of a society might be revealed. Art and crime can both be seen as foils against which to test social (dis)order and inconsistencies between public perceptions and reality. This argument was made by surrealists as well. Jonathan P. Eburne has shown that the surrealists, too, were deeply fascinated with De Quincey’s essay. According to Eburne, “Recognizing the popular and clinical impact of crime to be an admixture of fiction and fact, the Surrealists viewed crime as a phenomenon of the marvelous, an event characterized by the discrepancies and excesses it brought to light.”24 Crime scenes and accounts of violence were commonplace in surrealist magazines. The surrealists found heroes in murderers—for example, Germaine Berton and Violette Nozière, who had both committed crimes against men symbolizing the patriarchal and oppressive system (Berton was the young anarchist who assassinated the publishing secretary of the extreme right-wing nationalist party L’Action Française, and Nozière poisoned her father in 1933, claiming afterward that he had been sexually abusing her since she was twelve). The surrealists demonstrated their solidarity by writing poems about Nozière and arranging headshot photographs of themselves in a photomontage centered around a police mug shot of Berton, published in La révolution surréaliste in December 1924. The notion that the societal role of the artist can be the same as the outlaw’s was also reflected in punk. In punk and surrealism both, there was a view that criminality was the most ethical position in a fight against an immoral system; the “criminal,” in fact, had only been pushed to his or her actions because of that injustice. The idea reflected in this argument was akin to Breton’s “pistol in hand”: the outlaw/artist represented a conscious alternative to the “system of debasement and cretinization.”25 COUM Transmissions thus inscribe themselves in a double-sided tradition of crime as art and art as crime.

Scandal! COUM’s idea with G.P.O. Versus G.P-O.—to use scandal, controversy, and affront as media in themselves—relates to the surrealists. This idea was put even more ferociously to work in one incident that took place later in that quintessential punk year, 1976. COUM’s by- now infamous exhibition at the ICA that October, Prostitution, coincided not only with the emergence of punk in London but also with the social rupture and right-wing backlash that resulted from the economic crisis of the 1970s (fig. 12.1). The artists deliberately poked fun at those insecurities. COUM’s Prostitution exhibition contained framed pages from pornographic magazines featuring Tutti and photos of past performances and used props, including bloody 213

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Fig. 12.1  Cosey Fanni Tutti, Sexual Transgressions No. 5, poster from the exhibition Prostitution, ICA, October 1976. Tate Collection, London. Courtesy of the artist.

tampons, meat cleavers, rectal syringes, chains, knives, Vaseline, and a double-ended dildo with spikes. The core work of the exhibition was the series Magazine Actions (1974–76) by Cosey Fanni Tutti, and thus the picture the group used as their key visual on the Prostitution press release was Sexual Transgressions No. 5 (1976). The photo shows Cosey Fanni Tutti lying on a divan, her arm draped casually over its backrest, her left leg propped up to reveal her genitalia. She is wearing a black corset, garters, and a black eye mask. The image is a clear reference to Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), which provoked a scandal when it was presented at the Salon de Paris in 1865. Olympia in turn references other historic nudes, such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814), but Manet makes no secret of the fact that the subject is a prostitute, perhaps even a defiant one. Not only did Manet break the traditional Passional Attractions

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academic illusion of a higher allegory to explain and justify the nudity, but the viewer is unsettled by the directness of the woman’s pose and glare: “Show me the money,” as Michael Kimmelman interprets her.26 Tutti both augments and twists the image: she stares down (at) the viewer, but her own face remains disguised. Her legs are open (as opposed to Manet’s Olympia, who holds her hand over her genitalia), but her look is aggressive. That Tutti worked as a nude model for sex magazines gives the image an air of gritty realness. Tutti’s crotch-exposing outfit and her confrontational stare furthermore recall Peter Hassmann’s photos of Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969). In Tutti’s case, the duality of her open legs and hidden face carries the layered motifs of transgression and impenetrability to an extreme. Another artwork on view at Prostitution was the series Tampax Romana. One piece of this series was an old art deco clock filled with twenty-eight of Cosey Fanni Tutti’s used tampons, called It’s That Time of the Month; another, called Pupae (or Larvae), had a plywood frame with a used tampon emerging out of a hairpiece and a box of maggots turning into flies.27 In a setting like the ICA, with an audience presumably well informed about art, the memento mori association was assured: the clock, the metamorphosis and subsequent decomposition of the maggots, and the transient subjects of rotting materials, blood, and flies all pointed in this direction. The ephemerality of the materials was countered by the series title, Tampax Romana—which might be seen as a hint at the decay and downfall of empires, as the Pax Romana refers to the period just before the Roman imperial crisis of the third century. The Tampax Romana series thus expressed the artists’ derisive view of the contemporary state of the British Empire in 1976. “Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to lay waste the ideas of family, country, religion,” Breton wrote in his “Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1924.28 COUM Transmissions aimed at the same targets in 1976, using humor, absurdity, and a heigtened sense of transmission as their weapons. The day Prostitution opened to the public, Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn’s reaction to the exhibition was quoted on the cover of the Daily Mail (October 19, 1976): “A sickening outrage. Sadistic. Obscene. Evil. These people are the wreckers of civilization. They want to advance decadence.” The critique was accompanied by a photo of the then still unknown punks Debbie Juvenile, Siouxsie Sioux, and Steve Severin on opening night. The show was a scandal: more than a hundred newspaper and magazine articles were published, questions were asked in Parliament, and the Arts Council publicly rescinded its funding of COUM Transmissions. COUM appropriated and affirmed the media response by integrating photocopied press articles into the exhibition and collaging outraged quotations together for flyers advertising the show. This points to another commonality between surrealism and punk: both movements were highly concerned with dissemination, publication, photo opportunities, and the role of magazines and pamphlets in achieving recognition. Punks, 215

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like the surrealists, took two approaches to display: one drew away from the public and took place in small cafés or underground venues (later to be seen in rare and partly fetishized photo documentations), while the other hijacked institutions in order to subvert them; if you wanted to épater les bourgeoisie (shock the middle classes), you needed to get their attention. P-Orridge recounts that s/he had “assembled, then surreptitiously utilized, a list of ‘yellow’ journals and journalists—around fifty or so names and addresses. I’d done this before and nothing had happened. I was thinking very much in terms of Dada and Surrealism. Sending out flyers to titillate and arouse.”29 Both surrealism and punk thus at times made use of a hyper-spectacular approach, though the degree of spectacle surely reached another level in the mass media landscape of the 1970s, with the by-effects of youth culture, yellow press, and television. The core ideas in the approach to media, however—the affirmation of low culture, the cultivation of scandal so as to reveal hypocrisy, the subversion through mirrored adaptation—were very much alike. John A. Walker describes Prostitution as “the only art world event equivalent to the impact made by the Sex Pistols shortly afterwards,” referring to the sensationalist media uproar after the Sex Pistols and their entourage appeared on the Bill Grundy TV show Today.30 The comparison with the Sex Pistols is self-evident: the breakthrough of both groups in late 1976 marked the visibly hateful clash between a conservative establishment (infuriated by the consequences of 1968 and cornered by the economic crisis) and a youthful counterculture that was pointing out the downfall of the UK with glee. Perhaps neither the Sex Pistols, in their appearance on Grundy’s show, nor COUM Transmissions at the ICA anticipated the extent of the scandal, but in both cases the affronts were calculated and were in essence attempts to sabotage the cultural, social, political, and media status quo.

Broken Bodies, Fantasy Fetishism One of the works that COUM put on display in the Prostitution show was P-Orridge’s Venus Mount or Venus Mound (part of the Tampax Romana series) (see color plate 16). The small assemblage depicts a shattered, blackened female torso, the breasts and head of which are partly broken off. A dark wire holds one of Tutti’s used tampons on either side of the bust, which is placed centrally in a traditional exhibition display case. The title is an appropriation of the classical figure of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, desire, sex, and beauty. Here, however, she is a mutilated goddess. Combined with Mount, which may be understood here in the sense of staged, installed, or encased, this could imply a critique of fixed or enforced roles of women. Furthermore, the term “Venus mound” is used to describe the pubic mound: that is, the mons veneris. “Mound of Venus” is also a term in palmistry that refers to the part of the palm that designates love and sensuality. Passional Attractions

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The composition of Venus Mount/Mound recalls Salvador Dalí’s Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933), which is also a female bust centered between two corncobs held together by a necklace of straw. A loaf of bread is balanced on her head, and on her face Dalí has painted a swarm of ants. Both Venus Mount/Mound and Retrospective Bust make use of unusual juxtapositions of ephemeral materials and classical busts, and both are assembled from found objects. Dalí’s surprising use of phallic bread and corn, however, is made cruder in P-Orridge’s use of old tampons. Dalí’s bust is made of fragile, beautiful white porcelain, and the woman is presented in a context of consummation (at the same time, though, there are those ants, perhaps suggestive of rot). P-Orridge counteracts this with a rough setting: the bust is made of plaster and is ruggedly attached to a black plinth. Both artists thus seem to comment on the female body, but in contrast to the lush sexuality of Dalí’s work, P-Orridge shows a bloody, everyday version of what the female body does. The metal wire and the brokenness of the figure allude to violence against women. The face of Dalí’s bust is idealized and neutral—a small smile, an empty gaze, and rosy cheeks— but P-Orridge’s has no face; the features have been smashed. In COUM’s work, there is no aestheticization, only mutilation. The string may evoke fantasies of strangulation or hanging, recalling the violent and sexual connotations of such surrealist precursors as Hans Bellmer’s dolls and mannequins (1932–45), Man Ray’s Venus Restored (1936), and Danish surrealist Wilhelm Freddie’s Sex-paralyseappeal (1936), a classical female bust with a rope around her neck. P-Orridge also specifically mentions Max Ernst’s cut-up illustrations from nineteenth-century drawings and accompanying uncanny captions in La femme 100 têtes (the hundred headless woman) (1929) as an inspiration for becoming an artist.31 Dalí claimed that his surrealist sculpture was “created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character.”32 Such notions of tangibility and corporeality, often aligned with bodily alterations, played a role in punk fashion and punk art, too—for example, in the works of Vivienne Westwood, Linder Sterling, and the Berlin-based art and music group Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris). These intersections between fashion and violence, fetishism and fantasy, further evoke the works of Meret Oppenheim, such as Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers (1936), Sugar Ring (1936–37), and the stitched-together shoes in The Couple (1956). Notions of tangibility, impossibility, absurdity, corporeality, subversion, and black humor connect surrealism and punk. As in the case of P-Orridge’s Venus, however, the punk works are generally less aesthetic and more direct. Both COUM and surrealists were interested in (the troubling side of) eroticism and desire. In order to investigate issues of resistance and obedience, these themes were transferred from the sexual to the social sphere and vice versa. As movements, both surrealism and punk carried within them different manifestations of eroticism: there are versions 217

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in both movements that are more romantic, more radical, more poetic, more evil than others. Walter Benjamin’s assertion that surrealism might disinfect by promoting evil is more palpable in the work of Bellmer than in that of Magritte, for example. Likewise, in punk, the Sex Pistols—with their poetic “we’re the flowers in the dustbin” from “God Save the Queen”—emerge as a more fragile and indeed more romantic group than COUM Transmissions. The Sex Pistols—like COUM and like the whole punk movement—made concrete, lived out, and intensified ideas from the interwar avant-gardes. Within the punk spectrum, however, COUM was possibly the most extreme example of this strategy: COUM believed that the system was evil and that evil must be fought with evil.

Fragmented Identities and Exquisite Corpses Many years later, in the 1990s, P-Orridge and h/er wife, Jackie Breyer, undertook a yearlong process of endeavoring to become each other, each changing gender and identity through hormones, implants, costumes, gold crowns, and surgical operations. Breyer and P-Orridge strived to create a third gender out of love. The result was a two-person cut-up, almost a real-life exquisite corpse, the collage technique transferred to actual bodies. The process was documented in an exhibition titled Painful but Fabulous at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 2004. On view were blown-up photographic details of the surgeries, healing process, and results. Among the bloodiness and suffering, the work has a touching vulnerability and almost naïve outsider beauty, as the romantic idea of consuming or becoming one’s lover is made real. The image You Are My Other Half (2003) (see color plate 17) specifically uses the idea of a cut-up personality. The fragmented faces of Breyer and P-Orridge allude to the surrealists’ use of poetic automatism and also to their use of photo-booth images in the journal La révolution surréaliste in 1929, for example. Another interesting point of comparison (and contrast) can be made with the photographs of Pierre Molinier, whom Breton integrated into the surrealist group in the late 1950s and whose work was included in the 1959 EROS exhibition. Molinier’s photomontages are often self-portraits (taken with a remote switch) in cross-dressing roles such as the dominatrix and succubus, using prosthetics, dildos, and parts of mannequins to put together various sexual creatures (fig. 12.2). By h/er own account, P-Orridge was deeply fascinated with Molinier after seeing the artist’s work as a child in a book about surrealism.33 Indeed, the desire, strangeness, and splendor of work by Fig. 12.2  Pierre Molinier, Éperon both artists is comparable. However, Molinier’s d’amour (Love spur), ca. 1960. © subjects are softly lit and aesthetically pleasing in 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. counterpoint to the jarring, postsurgical, swollen, stitched, and harshly lit photographs shown in Passional Attractions

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the Painful but Fabulous exhibition. The physicality of these images points to the reality and pain of the process that Breyer and P-Orridge experienced; there is no aesthetic seduction. In contrast, Molinier stages fantasies in beauty, assembling impossible erotic self-encounters in lavish costumes of chains, feathers, nail polish, stockings, masks, and stilettos. In the comparison between the photos of Breyer P-Orridge (the name Breyer and P-Orridge gave themselves after their melding) and the photos of Pierre Molinier, physique and mentality are under scrutiny in a way that involves both pain and play. Subversive themes such as gender ambiguity (or inversion), the fragmentation of body and identity, and the quest for mental and social emancipation recur in both surrealism and punk. The self-expression of punks was often paired with physical and aesthetic modification, in a combination of body art, style, and everyday performance. The mutability of identity and gender was also expressed in the use of manifold names and aliases in both surrealism and punk. Among the artists associated with surrealism who used different names were Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob), and Marcel Duchamp, with his numerous pseudonyms: George W. Welch, Rrose Sélavy, Richard Mutt, and others. Punk musicians and artists frequently used aliases as well, e.g., Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Siouxsie Sioux, and Cosey Fanni Tutti. The aliases punks devised were sometimes directly linked to surrealist names, such as the punk singer Mona Mur (“mon amour”), reminiscent of Duchamp’s alias Rrose Sélavy (“Éros, c’est la vie”). In both movements, pseudonyms were used to highlight certain attributes (such as “vicious” or “rotten”) or cultural frames (the Native American “Sioux”). In Tutti’s case, the message “all women are like that,” from Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte (1790), is given a new connotation due to her work in pornography. The use of aliases is a recurrent tactic in guerrilla warfare and among revolutionaries, and also in circus and noir cabaret and among sex workers and Wild West outlaws. Such subversive and at the same time humorous associations with noms de guerre and show business fantasies would have been welcomed in both movements. Above all, these aliases emphasize that identity—and gender—can be constructed and chosen.

This Is the End In both punk and surrealism, there was a sensation that what was important and what was dangerous would be found close to each other. The name “punk” itself was an embrace of decadence: the etymology of the word goes back to the late 1500s, when it meant “prostitute.” It was later used either for “a young inexperienced person or beginner,” “a usually petty gangster, hoodlum, or ruffian,” or as slang for “a young man used as a

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homosexual partner, especially in a prison.”34 Punk was (and is) about sex, money, crime, youth, and abused power. At least in the early days of the punk movement, the expectation and attitude was that there was no future. “There’s no future in England’s dreaming,” as Johnny Rotten sang in “God Save the Queen.” The radical nature of punk was linked to the cancellation of dreaming, the focus redirected to the now. In this sense, punk was never an avant-garde movement: punks were not interested in “leading the way” but rather in burning down the house. This destructive energy, however, lasted only briefly. The punk band Crass released their “Punk Is Dead” track in 1978. The members of Crass lived together in an anarchist-pacifist open-house art collective in Essex and were advocates of a direct-action approach. “Our anathema was no future,” Penny Rimbaud of Crass has explained. “We said: ‘We’re not going to have all these young kids thinking that there isn’t. We’ll go out and show that there is a future.’”35 The punk movement’s politics became more grounded. Punks developed agendas: veganism, environmentalism, feminism, anticonsumerism, and animal rights all became important themes in punk. COUM Transmissions moved on, too, becoming Throbbing Gristle; with the founding of their Industrial Records label in 1976, they were among the first to define themselves as “industrial.” In RE/Search 6–7: Industrial Culture Handbook (1983), the most influential early account of industrial culture, Jon Savage writes, “In the gap caused by the failure of punk rock’s apocalyptic rhetoric, ‘industrial’ seemed like a good idea.”36 Many punks moved into industrial culture at this point. “The people involved with RE/Search, who were all punks . . . wanted to set aside—or at least not talk directly about—music, and get back to that stronger Surrealist-Dada tradition,” Nat Trotman observes. “They felt they were facing the ‘failure of punk,’ the assimilation of that movement into the mainstream and the rising feeling of its impossibility. Noise music and industrial music tried to break through that.”37 Punk was indeed in many ways an “impossibility,” as Nat Trotman says. At the same time, that very impossibility, that romantic madness, crystalizes as the power of punk: how to show the madness of the world, if not by being (spectacularly!) mad yourself? Punk was not meant to last a long time; punks were willfully burning their candle at both ends. Not unlike the surrealists, however, the artists, poets, and musicians involved with punk, after some time, adapted their strategies to be able to move on. As one spray-painted slogan from the late 1970s read, alluding to the succession of kings: Punk is dead. Long live punk!

Notes

1. Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 125. 2. “Anarchy in the UK,” like the other Sex Pistols songs quoted in this chapter, was released on the

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1977 Virgin Records LP Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. 3. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 3. 4. See Wollen, “Bitter Victory.”

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5. Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities, 47. 6. Beckett, When the Lights Went Out, 15. 7. Savage, “London Subversive,” 29. 8. Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot,” 1092. 9. Savage, “World’s End,” 46. 10. Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation, 5.16. 11. Bracewell, “Some Notes for the Exhibition,” 13. 12. Quoted in Savage, England’s Dreaming, 250. 13. Quoted in Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation, 4.10. 14. Quoted in ibid., 6.33. 15. COUM Transmissions, G.P.O. Versus G.P.-O., unpaginated. 16. Rushkoff, “Good Trip or Bad Trip,” 20. 17. Quoted in Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation, 4.11. 18. COUM Transmissions, G.P.O. Versus G.P.-O. 19. Quoted in Art Institute of Chicago and Rondeau, Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, 124. 20. COUM Transmissions, G.P.O. Versus G.P.-O. 21. Quoted in Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation, 6.13. 22. Quoted in COUM Transmissions, G.P.O. Versus G.P.-O. 23. Observer (London), April 11, 1976, reproduced in ibid.

Bibliography

Art Institute of Chicago and James Rondeau. Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago: Highlights of the Collection. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2017. Exhibition catalog. Beckett, Andy. When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” 1929. In Modernism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, 1087–95. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Bracewell, Michael. “Some Notes for the Exhibition.” In Red, White, and Blue: Pop, Punk, Politics, Place, edited by Chelsea Space, 8–20. London: University of the Arts, 2012. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)” and “Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930).” In Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 1–48 and 117–94, respectively. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Brown, Kate. “Genesis P-Orridge, Known for the Band Throbbing Gristle and Art that Transcended Gender, Has Died.” Artnet News,

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24. Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, 1–2. 25. Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 125. 26. Kimmelman, “Rendezvous with Manet in Paris.” 27. In the Tate Archive’s main collection, the work is called Larvae; in the exhibition Punk: No One Is Innocent at Kunsthalle Wien (2008), it was called Pupae. 28. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 128. 29. Quoted in Metzger, “Nothing Short of a Total War,” 44. 30. Walker, “Panic Attack,” 14. 31. Brown, “Genesis P-Orridge.” 32. Dalí, Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 312. 33. Quoted in the press release for the exhibition Breyer P-orridge & Pierre Molinier, September 5– October 12, 2014, https://​invisible​-exports​.com​ /exhibitions​/breyer​-p​-orridge​-pierre​-molinier/. 34. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “punk,” accessed August 31, 2021, https://www.merriam -webster.com/dictionary/punk. 35. Quoted in Savage, England’s Dreaming, 481. 36. Savage, “Introduction,” 4. 37. Quoted in Santisi, “Interview.”

March 16, 2020. https://​news​.artnet​.com​/art​ -world​/genesis​-p​-orridge​-died​-1805331. COUM Transmissions. G.P.O. Versus G.P.-O.: A Chronicle of Mail Art on Trial Coumpiled by Genesis P-Orridge and COUM. Geneva: Ecart Publications, 1976. MoMA Queens Artists’ Books, file no. P1.A12g, MoMA Archives, New York. Dalí, Salvador. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. Translated by Haakon M. Chevalier. New York: Dial Press, 1942. Eburne, Jonathan P. Surrealism and the Art of Crime. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Ford, Simon. Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. London: Black Dog, 1999. Kimmelman, Michael. “A Rendezvous with Manet in Paris.” New York Times, May 16, 2011. Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post–World War I Reconstruction in France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989.

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Metzger, Richard. “Nothing Short of a Total War.” In Painful but Fabulous: The Lives and Art of Genesis P-Orridge, edited by Nick Mamatras, Maggie Balistreri, Ellen Moynihad, and Don Goede, 43–49. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2002. P-Orridge, Genesis, and Peter Christopherson. “Annihilating Reality.” Studio International 192, no. 982 (1976): 44–48. Rushkoff, Douglas. “Good Trip or Bad Trip? The Art and Heart of Genesis P-Orridge.” In Painful but Fabulous: The Lives and Art of Genesis P-Orridge, edited by Nick Mamatras, Maggie Balistreri, Ellen Moynihad, and Don Goede, 19–28. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2002. Santisi, Meg. “Interview: Nat Trotman on RE/ Search Magazine.” Columbia at CAA, March 2, 2014. http://​blogs​.colum​.edu​/caa​/interview​ -nat​-trotman​-on​-research​-magazine. Savage, Jon. England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.

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———. “Introduction.” In RE/Search 6–7: Industrial Culture Handbook, edited by V. Vale, 4–5. San Francisco: RE/Search, 1983. ———. “London Subversive.” In Goodbye to London: Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies, edited by Astrid Proll, 12–31. Cologne: Hatje Cantz, 2010. ———. “The World’s End: London Punk, 1976–1977.” In Punk: No One Is Innocent; Kunst–Stil– Revolte, edited by Kunsthalle Wien, Gerald Matt, and Thomas Mießgang, 40–47. Nuremberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2008. Exhibition catalog. Walker, John A. “Panic Attack!” Art Book 15, no. 1 (2008): 14–15. Wollen, Peter. “Bitter Victory: The Art and Politics of the Situationist International.” In On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972, edited by Elisabeth Sussman, 20–61. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

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Contributors Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is a professor of political aesthetics in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. He is the author of a number of books, most recently Trump’s Counter-Revolution and Hegel After Occupy. He has written extensively on the Situationist International and, among other things, coedited Expect Anything, Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere and Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere. Jonathan P. Eburne is a professor of comparative literature, English, and French and francophone studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is founding coeditor of ASAP/Journal, author of the award-winning Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas and Surrealism and the Art of Crime, and coeditor of four other books. He is currently completing a book titled The Great Surrealist Bargain Basement. David Hopkins is a professor of art history at the University of Glasgow, UK. His publications include After Modern Art, 1945–2000; Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction; Dada’s Boys: Masculinity After Duchamp; Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada (coedited with Michael White); A Companion to Dada and Surrealism; and Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood. Claire Howard is the assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Blanton Museum of Art. She previously held the Vivian L. Smith Foundation Fellowship at the Menil Collection and was a research assistant for modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Howard earned a PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. Elliott H. King is an associate professor of art history at Washington and Lee University. His publications include the monograph Dalí, Surrealism, and Cinema and various essays and scholarly contributions to Dalí and surrealism exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Tate Modern, and the Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli. His curated exhibitions include Dalí: The Late Work; Frida and Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting; Magritte: Reflections of Another World; and Dalí/Halsman.

Michael Löwy is an emeritus research director in social sciences at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He is an active member of contemporary international surrealist groups. Among his recent works translated into English are Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian

Thought in Central Europe; A Study in Elective Affinity; On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin; Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (with Robert Sayre); Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”; and Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia.

Alyce Mahon is a reader in modern and contemporary art history at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the monographs Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968; Eroticism and Art; and The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde, and of numerous book and journal essays on surrealism, performance art, and feminist art practice. She was the curator of Dorothea Tanning, the first major retrospective exhibition of the American surrealist, for the Museo Reina Sofía and Tate Modern (2018–19), and has served as an author and curatorial advisor for many international surrealist exhibitions—most recently for Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire, 1930–1990; Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish; and Leonora Carrington. Gavin Parkinson is a professor of modern art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and was editor of the Ashgate and Routledge series Studies in Surrealism. He has published numerous essays and articles, mainly on surrealism. His books are Enchanted Ground: André Breton, Modernism, and the Surrealist Appraisal of Fin-de-Siècle Painting; Futures of Surrealism: Myth, Science Fiction, and Fantastic Art in France, 1936–1969; Surrealism, Art, and Modern Science; The Duchamp Book; and the edited collection Surrealism, Science Fiction, and Comics. His book Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism: Art History, “Sensibility,” and War in the 1960s is forthcoming. Grégory Pierrot is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford. He is the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture, a coeditor, with Marlene L. Daut and Marion C. Rohrleitner, of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology, and translator of Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli’s Free Jazz/Black Power.

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Contributors

Penelope Rosemont is an artist, writer, and publisher who was welcomed into the Paris Surrealist Group by André Breton in 1966, and she coauthored the essay “Surrealism in the U.S.,” which appeared in the Paris-based surrealist journal L’Archibras. Her work was included by Arturo Schwarz in the 1986 Venice Biennale “Art and Alchemy” presentation. Her books include Surrealist Women: An International Anthology; Dreams and Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS, and the Seven Cities of Cibola; and Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. Ron Sakolsky is the editor of the anthology Surrealist Subversions, which focuses on the Chicago Surrealist Group. He has written and edited many books, including three collections of anarcho-surrealist essays, poems, and tracts—Scratching the Tiger’s Belly, Swift Winds, and Creating Anarchy—which together form a trilogy on anarchy and surrealism. His most recent work, Dreams of Anarchy and the Anarchy of Dreams, focuses on the historical and philosophical intersections between anarchy and surrealism. Marie Arleth Skov is a Danish art historian, author, and curator based in Berlin. She works on the subjects of music, art, and sexuality, with a historical focus on surrealism and the punk movement of the 1970s and 1980s. She is an international affiliate of the Punk Scholars Network. Ryan Standfest is a Detroit-based multimedia artist. He is the editor and publisher of Rotland Press, founded in 2010, which presents satirical publications of a culturally relevant nature. Abigail Susik is an associate professor of art history at Willamette University and the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work. She is coeditor of the volume Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries, and has contributed numerous essays on surrealism to publications such as Surrealism Beyond Borders; Journal of Surrealism and the Americas; and The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism. Her curated exhibitions include Alan Glass: Surrealism’s Secret and “For Myself”: Nudes by Imogen Cunningham, 1906–1939. Sandra Zalman is an associate professor of art history at the University of Houston and the author of Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism, which won the SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication. She recently coedited the volume Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949.

Contributors

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Index Page numbers in italics indicate figures. References marked as plate 1, etc. indicate color plates. Acconci, Vito, 213 Adams, Derrick, The Institution of Me, 147–48 Addams, Charles, 182 Addams Family, The (cartoon), 182 Addams Family, The (TV show), 182 Adlington, Robert, 49 Adorno, Theodor, 9 AFL-CIO, 164 African American Review (journal), 150 Afrofuturism, 148–49, 150, 153 Afronauts, 148 Afrosurrealism as counterculture of modernity, 144–45, 153–54 genealogies of, 145–52 as term, 14–15 Afrosurreal Writers Workshop, 155n29 Ahrens, Gale, 69 Alexis, Jacques Stephen, 147 Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), 121 Algerian War Generals’ putsch (1961), 101 surrealist opposition to, 14, 99–101, 121–22, 124n16 Alleg, Henri, La question, 121 Allende, Salvador, 122 Amadou, Robert, 128, 129 anarchism, 116, 157, 158, 168, 170 Anarchist Horde, 158 Anderson, Jim, 196 animal activism, 160, 162, 163–64, 167–68, 169–70 “Another Paradise Lost! A Surrealist Program of Demands on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster” (Surrealist Movement in the United States), 169 “Anteater’s Umbrella, The” (Chicago Surrealist Group), 65, 169–70 anticapitalism economic crisis and, 21–22 environmentalist movement and, 162 May ’68 uprising and, 22–24 situationist movement and, 130–34, 138–39 anticolonialism, 14, 99–101, 121–22, 124n16, 152–53 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 177 Aragon, Louis, 36, 136, 146, 208, 212 Archibras, L’ (magazine), 4, 5, 20, 78, 87, 122–23 Arguelles, José, 32 Ark (magazine), 161

Arman, 102, 106 Armstrong, Louis, 51 Arnaud, Noël, 128–29 Arp, Jean, 84 Arrabal, Fernando, 68 Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion (journal), 55, 62, 64, 68, 159, 162, 165 Artaud, Antonin, 20, 62 “Theatre of Cruelty,” 183 Artner, Alan, 68 Art of Assemblage, The (exhibition; Museum of Modern Art, New York), 104–5 Ashbaugh, Carolyn, Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary, 69 Audoin, Philippe, 76, 78, 82, 83 avant-garde Afrosurrealism as, 144 black humor and, 183–84 Chicago Surrealist Group as, 166 situationism as, 130 as term, 142–44 Axe Street Arena (Chicago), 72 Ayler, Albert, 50 Bach, Karl, 124n30 Ball, Hugo, 213 Baraka, Amiri Afrosurrealism and, 14–15, 151–52 Joans and, 43, 47, 50, 53, 54, 57 poetic style, 49, 53 “Black Art,” 53 “Black Dada Nihilismus,” 151 Blues People, 49 Dutchman, 45 Barbara’s Bookstore (Chicago), 62, 63 Barbey, Bruno, 25 Bari, Judi, 67, 160, 169 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 95 Barrès, Maurice, 212 Barth, John, 179 End of the Road, 181 Barthes, Roland, 100 Bataille, Georges, 100 Eroticism, 93 Tears of Eros, The, 93 Battcock, Gregory, 38, 41n39 Baudelaire, Charles, 177 Bauman, Zygmunt, 144, 153 Bearden, Romare, 46, 151 Beardsley, Aubrey, 192

Beauvoir, Simone de, 83, 84–85, 121 deuxième sexe, Le , 81–82 Beckett, Andy, 208 Beecher, Jonathan, 77, 78, 83–84, 86 Bellmer, Hans, 203, 217 Benayoun, Robert, 53, 62, 98, 101, 104–5, 107 Benjamin, Walter, 140n29, 142, 208, 218 Benoît, Jean, 20, 25, 80 Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade, 117 nécrophile, Le, 84 Berger, Vivian, 197 Bernstein, Michèle, 130 Bertelé, René, 44 Berton, Germaine, 213 Bief, jonction surréaliste (journal), 129 Black, Brown, and Beige (anthology), 146, 147, 148, 152 Black American Literature Forum (journal), 150 Black Camera (journal), 146 black humor absurd vs. grotesque, 179–80 Breton’s humour noir theory, 176–78, 182, 187 cartoons as medium for, 182, 185 nihilistic approach, 187–88 in O’Donoghue’s work, 182–85 socioeconomic cruelty and, 178–79 in Southern’s work, 180–81, 184 in Warhol’s work, 185–87, 187 Black Panther Party, 50, 51, 55 Black Power movement jazz and, 48, 49, 50–52, 55 Joans’s surrealist approach, 52–57, 123 race riots and, 114, 115–17, 118–19, 123 Black Swan Press / Surrealist Editions, 159 Blake, Peter, 191 Blake, William, 191, 192 Blanchot, Maurice, 21, 100 Blavatsky, Helena, 192 Blind Blake, 66 Bloch, Ernst, 21, 22 Blues Unlimited (magazine), 66 Blum, Andrea, 69 Bly, Robert, 71 Bode, Arnold, 95 Bodomo, Frances, 148 Boltanksi, Luc, 23–24 Borde, Raymond, “Nous voulons un enfant,” 84 Borges, Jorge Luis, 144, 150 Bounoure, Vincent, 63, 64, 80 Boupacha, Djamila, 121 Bowles, Paul, 46 Boyd, B. R., The New Abolitionists, 167 BP oil spill (2010), 169 Bracewell, Michael, 209 Bracey, John, Jr., 64 Brauner, Victor, 121

Index

brèche: Action surréaliste, La (journal), 78, 85, 105 Breton, André Algerian War, opposition to, 14, 101, 121 Barrès trial and, 212 British reception of, 193 drug culture and, 36, 194 L’Écart absolu and, 76, 80, 86, 108 EROS and, 93–94 Fourier and, 76, 77, 78, 201–2 in Haiti, 145–46 on humour noir, 176–78, 182, 187 Joans and, 45–46 Lamantia and, 67 Matta and, 119, 120, 124n30 May ’68 uprising and, 20 mentioned, 4, 62, 151, 157, 165 on museum orgy, 86 on nature, 160 in Oz magazine, 198 Parinaud and, 102 on poetic analogy, 106–7 Rauschenberg on, 92 on “the simplest surrealist act,” 45, 207 situationism and, 129, 136 Surrealist Intrusion and, 97 on women’s liberation, 80–81, 82 World War I and, 208 Anthologie de l’humour noir, 177–78 Arcane 17, 80–82, 160 “Ascendant Sign,” 107 Mad Love, 106 Manifestoes of Surrealism, 106, 146, 194, 202, 207, 215 Nadja, 72 Ode à Charles Fourier, 77 What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, 71, 204n11 Breton, Elisa, 67, 71, 77, 80 Breuker, Willem, 48, 49 Breyer, Jacqueline (Lady Jaye), 209, 218–20 You Are My Other Half, 218, plate 17 Brill, John, 160 Brooks, Gloria, 68 Brown, Cecil, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, 47 Brown, John, 51 Brown, Norman O., Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, 85 Brown, Pete, 192 Brumes Blondes (journal), 64 Brundage, Slim, 158 Brutus, Dennis, 68 Buhle, Paul, 62, 72 Bulletin de liaison surréaliste (journal), 64 Bürger, Peter, 8, 33 Burns, Thom, 67, 69, 71, 73n14 Burri, Alberto, 103

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Burroughs, William S., 2–3 Naked Lunch, 180, 212 Butor, Michel, 135 cadavre exquis, 46 Cage, John, 94, 108 Cahun, Claude, 220 Calas, Nicolas, 94 Cammell, Donald, 199 Campbell, Duncan, 212 capitalism aesthetic emancipation from, 131, 133, 134, 137 artistic critique of, 23–24 the spectacle and, 132–34 See also anticapitalism Captain Beefheart, 182 Carles, Philippe, 58n47 Carmichael, Stokely, 50–51, 54, 55, 123 Carrington, Leonora Algerian War, opposition to, 121 environmental activism, 161, 162 mentioned, 62, 157, 177 in Mexico, 65–66 Down Below, 69 Carroll, Lewis, 177, 191 Carter, Chris, 209 cartoons, 158, 167, 168, 168, 182, 185, 198, plate 13 Casey, Angel, 68 Castelli, Leo, 94, 95, 99 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 23 Catlett, Lucy, 68–69 Cave, Nick, 149 censorship, 95, 110–11n20, 177, 180, 197, 212 Césaire, Aimé, 50, 62, 145, 146, 147 Return to My Native Land, 63 Césaire, Suzanne, 145, 147 Cesariny, Mario, 68 Chamberlain, John, 105 Chaplin, Ralph, “Only the Drums Remembered,” 159–60 Chapman, J. M., 38 Chat Qui Pêche, Le (Paris), 50–51 Chiapello, Eve, 23–24 Chicago riots (1968), 2–3, 3, 4, 6, 37 Chicago Surrealist Group activism campaigns and protests, 61, 65, 69, 70, 71, 117, 169–70 Afrosurrealism and, 146, 148 Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, 55, 62, 64, 68, 159, 162, 165 environmentalism and, 160–62, 166–67, 169–70 European allies, 4, 62–64, 72 exhibitions, 67–68, 70, 117, 148, 158, plate 6 Joans and, 55, 71 Marcuse and, 9, 64, 65 Mexico allies, 65–66

229

New Orleans allies, 62, 72 precursors of, 156–59 protest of Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition, 37 Rebel Women collaboration, 68–69 San Francisco allies, 67 solidarity and, 11 Solidarity Bookshop, 67, 158–59 Surrealist Insurrection, 4–6 Surrealist Research and Development Monograph series, 67 surrealist spirit, 7 at Telos conference (1971), 64–65 children’s rights, 201–2 Christopherson, Peter “Sleazy,” 209, 212–13 Chubbuck, Oso Blanco, 169 Clark, John, 72 Clarke, Arthur C., 200 Claro, Elisa. See Breton, Elisa Clash, the (music group), 209 Cleaver, Eldridge, 55 Cohen, Margaret, 140n29 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 22 Coleman, Ornette, 43 Collin, Frank, 70 colonialism avant-gardism and, 143 surrealist opposition to, 14, 99–101, 121–22, 124n16, 152–53 Coltrane, John, 151, 152 Comité d’action des intellectuels contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord, 100 Comité de Lutte contre la Représsion Coloniale, 99–100 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 49, 58n47 consumerism and commercialism, 78, 79, 80, 97, 108–9, 132–34 Cordier, Daniel, 121 Cornell, Joseph, 191 Corsiglia, Laura, 46 Corso, Gregory, 43 Cortez, Carlos, “Adios Tecopita,” 163–64 Cortez, Jayne, 68, 71, 147 COUM Transmissions (music and art collective) artistic approach, overview, 209–10 criminality and, 212–13 industrial identity, 221 porno postcards, 210–11 Prostitution exhibition, 213–16, 214, plate 16 counterculture of Afrosurrealism, 144–45, 153–54 British, 192–93 (see also Oz) vs. mass culture, 192, 200–201 as term, 7–8, 9 CounterPunch (magazine), 64 Courtot, Claude, 20, 62, 63

Index

Crane, Arnold, 68 Crane, Barbara, 68 Crass (music group), 221 Crawford, Marc, 118 Cream (music group), 198 Crevel, René, 67 criminality, 212–13 Cronenberg, David, 186 Crowley, Alastair, 192 Crumb, Robert, 182, 197 Cultural Correspondence (journal), 72, plate 7 Cunningham, Dennis, 67 Cusset, François, 139 Czarnowski, Adam, 72 Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (exhibition; Museum of Modern Art, New York), 33 catalog distribution, 190–91 protests and reviews at Chicago installation, 36–37 protests at New York installation, 30–32, 31, 34, 37–38, 38 reviews by critics, 32–36, 37 Rubin criticized for, 32, 37, 39, 39–40 Rubin’s defense of, 34, 35, 39, 41n42 Daley, Richard J., 2, 37 Dalí, Salvador, 6, 44, 80, 177, 195, 198 Retrospective Bust of a Woman, 217 Darger, Henry, 70 Darwin, Charles, 65 Dauben, Jean-Jacques J., 67, 69, 70, 71, 73n14 Daumel, René, 157 Davis, Mike, 116 Dax, Adrien, 78 Debbie Juvenile, 215 Debord, Guy British reception of, 193 on failure of surrealism, 129, 130, 135, 136, 137–38, 140n25 on revolutionaries, 139 situationist affiliation, 21, 23, 128 on the spectacle, 132, 133 Society of the Spectacle, The, 132 Debout, Simone, 83, 84, 86, 87 Debré, Michel, 101 Debs, Eugene, 167 “Declaration of the 121” (open letter), 14, 100–101, 124n16 Delany, Samuel R., Dhalgren, 149 Dennis, Felix, 196–97 Depestre, René, 146, 154 De Quincey, Thomas, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” 212–13 deschooling movement, 201–2 Destino (short film), 198 Diawara, Manthia, 57

Index

Dine, Jim, 105 Disney animation, 198 documenta 2 (exhibition; Kassel, Germany), 94–95 Drake, Hamid, 68 Drott, Eric, 49 Dr. Strangelove (film), 181 drug culture, 36, 192, 194–95, 198 Ducasse, Isidore, 52 Duchamp, Marcel Art of Assemblage and, 104 EROS and, 93–94, 95, 109 Matta and, 120 mentioned, 36, 191 neo-Dada and, 93, 109–10 pseudonyms, 220 Rauschenberg and, 92 Rubin and, 32 scholarship on, 62 Surrealist Intrusion and, 98 Fountain, 96 Trébuchet, 96 Ducornet, Rikki, 68 Duijn, Roel van, 124n12 Dumas, Henry, 150–51, 152 “Ark of Bones,” 151 Dutch surrealism and resistance movements, 48–49, 124n12 Duthuit, Georges, 124n30 Dylan, Bob, 199 Earth First! Journal, 169, 170–71 Earth First! movement, 160–68 Eburne, Jonathan P., 213 Écart absolu, L’ (exhibition; Galeriede l’OEil, Paris), 15 consommateur, Le , 79–80, 108–9, plate 8 Désordinateur, 82–83, 84, plate 9 Matta at, 117 as museum orgy, 86–87 title and theme, 76, 80, 108 Ecodefense Manual (Earth First!), 165 Edwards, Adrienne, 147 Edwards, Honeyboy, 68 Edwards, Mel, 71 Effenberger, Vratislav, 64 Elie-Dit-Cosaque, Gilles, 147–48 Elizabeth II, Queen of England, 208 Ellington, Duke, 151 Éluard, Paul, 146 Emmanuelle (anonymous), 86 End of the Road (film), 181–82 English, Michael, 196 environmental activism, 159–66 See also animal activism Epton, Bill, 115–16 Eregbu, Alexandria, 148 Ernst, Max

230

Algerian War, opposition to, 121 appropriation of, 199, 200 cartoon idioms and, 198 Matta and, 124n30 mentioned, 6, 80, 98 Smith and, 67 femme 100 têtes, La, 190, 199, 217 Une semaine de bonté, 199 EROS (Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme; Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris), 84, 86, 93–96, 96, 109, 110–11n20, 117, 218 eroticism. See sexual liberation and eroticism Esquire (magazine), 2–3, plate 1 Ewart, Douglas, 68 Faegre, Tor, 158 Fahlström, Öyvind, 97 Fairbairn, Nicholas, 215 Fanon, Frantz, 54 Black Skin, White Masks, 51–52 Farley, Alice, 68 Faucheux, Pierre, 15 Désordinateur, 82–83, 84, plate 9 Featherstone, Roger, 164–65 Felver, Chris, 12 femininity, 82 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 43, 72 City Lights Anthology, 67 First Papers of Surrealism (exhibition; Whitelaw Reid Mansion, New York), 32 Fisher, Mark, 139 Flahutez, Fabrice, 77 Flamel, Nicolas, 144 FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front), 121 Fontana, Lucio, 103, 107 Ford, Henry, 186 Foreman, Dave, 165 Forty, G. M., 212 Foucault, Michel, 100 Fourier, Charles Beauvoir on, 81–82 May ’68 uprising and, 87–88 on sexual liberation, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86 theories of absolute doubt and absolute deviation, 76, 77, 80, 108 theory of passional attractions, 17, 77, 201–2 on women’s oppression, 78–79, 81, 82 “Archibras, L’,” 78 nouveau monde amoureux, Le, 76, 83–84, 85, 86, 87 Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales, 76, 81 Traité de l’association domestique-agricole, 78 Francis, Terri, 145, 146–47 Freddie, Wilhelm, Sex-paralyseappeal, 217 free improvised music, 49 free jazz, 43, 48, 49–50

231

Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination, 72 Freud, Sigmund, 23, 77, 85, 98 “Humor, Der,” 178 Friedman, Bruce Jay, Black Humor, 179 Front Unique (journal), 121 Frye, Marquette and Ronald, 116 gallows humor, 178 Garon, Beth, 67, 69 Garon, Paul, 62, 65, 70, 71, 159 Blues and the Poetic Spirit, 66 Devil’s Son-in-Law, The, 66 Garvey, Marcus, 54 Gascoyne, David, 54 Short History of Surrealism, A, 191 Gasteren, Louis van, 48 Gaulle, Charles de, 100, 101 Geismar, Alain, 62 Genauer, Emily, 94 gender in black humor, 180–81, 182, 184–85 domestic roles, 78–80, 84–85 femininity, 82 fluid identity, 218–20, plate 17 masculinity, 82, 180, 181, 182 See also sexual liberation and eroticism; women Genet, Jean, 2–3 Ghostface Killa, 149 Giacometti, Alberto, Invisible Object, 95, 109 Gibson, Richard, 47 Gilchrist, Ellen, 62 Gillespie, Dizzy, 51 Gilroy, Paul, 144, 149–50, 153–54 Ginsberg, Allen, 43, 44, 46, 62, 62, 192, 193 Glissant, Edouard, 146 Godard, Jean-Luc, 135 Goldfayn, Georges, 64, 129 Goldman, Emma, 69 Goodchild, Jon, 195, 199 Goodman, Paul, 157 Gorky, Arshile, 117 Granell, Amparo, 68 Granell, E. F., 68, 95 Green, Robert, 66–67, 68, 69, 70, 158 “America: Free for All,” 163, 163 Green Anarchy (magazine), 169, 170 Greenberg, Clement, 8, 119, 200 Art and Culture, 104 Greer, Germaine, 194, 202–3 “Politics of Female Sexuality, The,” 202–3 “Universal Tonguebath: A Groupie’s Vision, The,” 202 Grindon, Gavin, 32 Grootveld, Robert Jasper, 124n12 Grose, Peter, 194 Guattari, Félix, 100

Index

Guevara, Che, 122 Haacke, Hans, 95 Haftmann, Werner, 95 Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, 55 Hains, Raymond, 107 Hall, Albert, 192 Hamilton, Richard, 191 Hampton, Fred, 67 Handy, W. C., 54 Hansen, Barbara, 167 Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (design team), 196, 199 Hare, Nathan, 55 Harris, Jonathan, 192 Hassmann, Peter, 215 Hayes, Harold, 2 Haynes, Doug, 178 Haynes, Jim, 192 Haywood, Big Bill, 165 Heartfield, John, 200 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, 180 Herzog, Dagmar, 85 Hesse, Hermann, 193 Hill, Joe, 158, 165 historicization and institutionalization, 30–34, 38–40 Hoffenberg, Mason, Candy (with Southern), 180–81, 184 Hoffman, Abbie, 201 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 21 Holman, Bill, 61 homosexuality, 190 Horovitz, Michael, 192 Hudson, Louise, 65, 69 Hughes, Langston, 44, 54 Hughes, Robert, 194, 200 humour noir, 176–78, 182, 187 See also black humor Humphries, Barry, 194 Hurston, Zora Neale, 151, 152 Husband, Bertha, 72 Huxley, Aldous, 193 Ignatiev, Noel, 70 Illich, Ivan, Deschooling Society, 201 Inđić, Trivo, 64 Industrial Worker (newspaper), 160, 163, 163–68, 166, 167, 168 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Earth First! movement and, 160, 163–68 iconography, 158 Rebel Worker, 157, 159, 162 Roosevelt University Wobbly Club, 156–57 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, Grande Odalisque, 214 In Memory of Georges Lukacs (pamphlet), 65

Index

institutionalization and historicization, 30–34, 38–40 International Exhibition of Surrealism (Galérie Beaux-Arts, Paris), 95, 119 International Surrealist Exhibition (New Burlington Galleries, London), 191 International Times (magazine), 194, 196 Ivšić, Radovan, 80 Jablonski, Joseph, 159 Surrealism in 2012, 62 Jaguer, Édouard, 67, 97, 121 James, Clive, 194 James, C. L. R., Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, 64 Jameson, Fredric, 204 Japanese resistance movements, 124n12 Jarry, Alfred, 82–83, 120, 144, 177 jazz free improvised music and, 49 in Joan’s poetic style, 44 as revolutionary practice, 46–52 Jazz and Poetry (short film), 48 Jean, Marcel, History of Surrealist Painting, 97 Jennings, Humphrey, 191 Jewish Museum, New York, 95 Joans, Ted, 12, plate 3 Chicago Surrealist Group and, 55, 71 exile status, 45, 47, 50, 57 influences on, 44, 54 legacy, 43 mentioned, 147 promotion of jazz as revolutionary practice, 46–52 surrealist approach to global Black politics, 52–57, 123 Beat Funky Jazz Poems, 44 Beat Poems, 44 “Black Flower,” 123 Black Manifesto in Jazz Poetry and Prose, 51, 53–54 “Cinque Maggio,” 55–56 “Few Blue Words to the Wise, A,” 53 “He Spy,” 47 “Jazz Is My Religion,” 48 “Letter to Students and Workers in Paris,” 51 “Long Distance,” 46 “My Ace of Spades,” 50 “Poet, The,” 48 “Real Black Power, The,” 51, plate 4 Truth, a Poem, The, 53 Johns, Jasper, 104, 109, 110, 191 Flag, 93 Target with Four Faces, 93 Target with Plaster Casts, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99 Johnson, James, 68 Johnson, Lyndon B., 30, 34, 118, 180

232

Johnson, Timothy, 67, 70, 71 Jones, James Earl, 181 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Jones, Rrata Christine, 68 Jorn, Asger, 119, 136 Joubert, Alain, 63 Jouffroy, Alain, 102, 122, 123 junk art, 105, 107 Kafka, Franz, 177 Kamrowski, Gerome, 68 Kaufman, Bob, 149 Kaufman, Irving R., 121 Keach, Stacey, 181 Keith, Kool, “Blue Flowers,” 149 Kelley, Robin D. G., 7 Black, Brown, and Beige (with Rosemont), 146, 147, 148, 152 Kennedy, Adrienne, 148 Kennedy, Robert, 35 Kerouac, Jack, 44 Kia Henda, Kiluanji, 148 Kidd, Leo and Randy, 118 Kimmelman, Michael, 215 Klein, Yves, 103, 135 Kornbluh, Joyce, Rebel Voices, 158, 163 Koslofsky, Jocelyn, 67, 69, 71, 73n14 Kozloff, Max, 35–36 Kramer, Hilton, 32, 33–34, 40n6 Kuiters, Piet, 48 Kukowski, Stephan, 72 labor groups. See Industrial Workers of the World Lacan, Jacques, 100 LaCoss, Donald, 20, 78 Lafargue, Paul, Right to Be Lazy, 64 Laing, R. D., 193 Politics of Experience, 196 Laloy, Yves, 95 Lam, Wifredo, 84, 121, 147 Lamantia, Philip, 67, 159, 160–61 Meadowlark West, 160 “Voice of Earth Mediums,” 162 Lancelot, Michel, 9 Laubier, Claire, 79 Laughlin, Clarence John, 62, 68 Lautréamont, Comte de, 144 Maldoror, 65 Lawrence, Jacob, 151 League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 64 Leary, Timothy, 193 Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 129, 140n4, 195 Lebel, Robert, 124n30, 195 Le Brun, Annie, 63 Lee, Don (Haki Madhubuti), 55 Lefebvre, Henri, 20, 21, 128

233

Lefort, Claude, 23 Legrand, Gérard, 46, 63, 64, 85, 101, 129 Lehoucq, Emile, 78 Leider, Philip, 33, 41n42 Leigh, Simone, 148 Leiris, Michel, 46 Lenin, Vladimir, 32 Lenk, Elisabeth, 9 Lennon, John, 192, 197 Leon, Jim, Necrophilia, 204 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 100, 124n30 Lewis, George, 68 Liberty Is a Vietnamese Word (pamphlet), 124n16 Life (magazine), 36, 118, 181 “Lighthouse of the Future, The” (manifesto), 67 Li’l Green Songbook (Earth First!), 165 Lincoln, Abbey, 54 Lincoln Park Zoo (Chicago), 65, 169–70 Litherland, Gina, “Unjust Dominion” (with Rammel), 167 Little, Ted, 212 Little Red Songbook (IWW), 165 Living Blues (magazine), 66 Lois, George, 2, plate 1 Lorca, Federico García, 120, 124n28 Losfeld, Eric, 53 Louis Lingg Memorial Chapter (SDS), 158 Loved One, The (film), 181 Lowry, Bates, 38 LSD, 36 Lukács, György, 65 Lumumba, Patrice, 54 Mackey, Nathaniel, 150 MAD (magazine), 179 Maddox, Conroy, 72 Magritte, René, 6, 200 Time Transfixed, 210–11 Treachery of Images, The, 211 Magruder, Agnes, 117 Mahon, Alyce, 7, 80, 86–87, 93 Malcolm X, 50, 54, 115 Mallarmé, Stéphane, Un coup de dés, 104 Manet, Édouard, Olympia, 214–15 Man Ray, 220 Venus Restored, 217 Virgin, 95–96 Mansour, Joyce, 62, 80 Manti, Peter, 65 Marchnight, Mari Jo, 72 Marcus, Greil, 17 Lipstick Traces, 207 Marcus, Lynn, 65 Marcuse, Herbert, 9, 17, 20, 21, 65, 193, plate 2 Eros and Civilization, 64, 85, 108, 202 One-Dimensional Man, 108

Index

marriage as commercial transaction, 78 French legislation on, 79–80 reproduction and, 84–85, 87 Marszalek, Bernard, 64, 158 Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire (exhibition; Gallery Black Swan, Chicago), 67–68, 148, 158, plate 6 Marx, Karl, 23, 131, 132 Mascolo, Dionys, 100 masculinity, 82, 180, 181, 182 Mason, Marie, 169 mass culture, 190–92, 200–201 Matta, Roberto global surrealist ties, 117 Lorca and, 120, 124n28 May ’68 uprising and, 20, 123 political activism through art, 120–23 shift in artistic style, 119–20 tribal art interests, 120, 124n30 Alabama, 122 “Apples We Know, The”, 120 Burn, Baby, Burn, 114–15, 123, plate 11 Disciples occupez la discipline, 16 Earth Is a Man, The, 120 Être avec, 120 First Goal of the Chilean People, The, 122 question, La, 121 question Djamila, La, 121–22 roses sont belles, Les, 121 Santo Domingo, 122 vertige d’eros, Le, 120, plate 12 Vietnam, 122 May ’68 uprising Fourier and, 87–88 legacy, 24–25 situationist involvement in, 21, 138–39 surrealist involvement in, 25, 34, 51, 52, 64, 123 Maya, 70 Mayoux, Alice, 68 McCarthy, Eugene, 2, 35 McClure, Michael, 43 McDarrah Fred, 44 McDonald’s, 168 McLaren, Malcolm, 207 McQueen, Alexander, 140n35 Meese, Ed, 65 Mehring, Walter, 207 Meinecke, Tristan, 68 Mellis, Miranda, None of This Is Real, 67 Memphis Minnie, 61 Mesens, E. L. T., 97 Messali Hadj, 100 Middel, Cristina de, 148 Miles, Barry, 192 Miller, D. Scot, “Afrosurreal Manifesto,” 146, 148–49 Index

Minotaure (journal), 119, 160 Mirbeau, Octave, Torture Garden, 183 Miró, Joan, 95 Molinier, Pierre, 84, 95, 218–20 Éperon d’amour, 219 Mondo Trasho (film), 182 Monk, Thelonious, 151, 152 “Monster of Consciousness Remains at Large, The” (manifesto), 66 Montague, Nathaniel “Magnificent,” 116, 117 Mora, Philippe, 200 Morris, William, 21, 192 Morrison, Toni, 149, 151, 152 Moscoso, Victor, 199 Moten, Fred, 49, 143, 150 Motherwell, Robert, 119 Muir, John, 164, 165 Murdoch, Rupert, 208 Murray, Charles Shaar, 203–4 Murray, Sonny, 53 Musée de Saint Denis, 123 museum orgy, 86–87 Mussolini, Benito, 56 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 115 Nash, Jørgen, 133 Nash, Paul, 191 National Lampoon (magazine), 185 Nation of Islam, 115 Nazis, 70 neo-Dada, 92–93, 95, 109–10 Neville, Richard, 190, 194, 195, 198, 199–200 Play Power, 201, 203 Newman, Barnett, 37 New Thing (free jazz), 43, 48, 49–50 Newton, Huey, 4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 177 Night of the Living Dead (film), 182 Nightwatch (newsletter), 65 Nin, Anaïs, 194–95 Nkoloso, Edward Makuka, 148 Noland, Kenneth, 38 nouveau réalisme, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107 Nozière, Violette, 213 Nuttall, Jeff, 192 O’Doherty, Brian, 92 O’Donoghue, Michael, 182–85 Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, The, 184–85, plate 13 Automation of Caprice, The, 183 Death of JFK, The, 183 Michael Hip and the Pale-Dry Death Machine, 183 “Paris in the Twenties,” 183–84, 185 Twilight of Cookie Lavagetto, The, 183 OEil, L’ (magazine), 80 234

Oldenburg, Claes, Batcolumn, 69 Oliver, Paul, 66 Oppenheim, Meret Cannibal Feast, 96 Couple, The, 217 Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers, 217 Sugar Ring, 217 Organization of Afro-American Unity, 115 Organization of Latin American Solidarity and Fidel Castro, 122 Orozco, José Clemente, 120 Oz (magazine) countercultural aspirations, 203–4 “Dream Power” issue, 201, 204 early issues of London-based version, 195–96 early surrealist influences, 194–95 “Female Energy” issue, 202–3 “Homosexual Oz” issue, 190, 199 “Magic Theatre” issue, 198, 199–200 scholarship on, 191 “School Kids” issue, 196–97, 198, 201, 202, plate 14 Paalen, Wolfgang, 98 Painful but Fabulous (exhibition; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin), 218 Paligot, Carole Reynaud, 99–100 Pallenberg, Anita, 199 Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969), 55 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 191, 198 Papp, Ronald, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73n14 Parent, Mimi, 20, 67 Parinaud, André, 102, 103 Paris Surrealist Group in 1970s vs. 1960s, 62–64 Algerian War, opposition to, 14, 99–101 Chicago Surrealist Group and, 4, 62–63 Joans and, 45–46, 49–51, 57 Matta in, 122 May ’68 uprising and, 25, 64 Parker, Charlie, 45, 51 Parkinson, Gavin, 200 Parsons, Lucy, 69 Passerini, Luisa, 20, 22, 23 Paz, Octavio, 65, 66, 71, 117 pedophilia, 202 Pendleton, Adam, 148 Péret, Benjamin, 46, 54, 66, 121, 129, 157, 177, 212 “Nature Devours Progress and Surpasses It,” 160 Performa 13, 147 Performance (film), 199 Perreault, John, 38–39, 41n42 Peters, Nancy Joyce, 67, 68, 72 Phases (magazine), 67 Picabia, Francis, 121 Picasso, Pablo, 35 “Anatomie, Une ,” 198 Guernica, 119 235

Pierre, José Algerian War, opposition to, 14, 101 L’Écart absolu and, 80 EROS and, 93, 94 on Rauschenberg, 98, 103–4, 106, 107, 108, 109 split of Paris Surrealist Group, 64 Surrealist Intrusion and, 97 on women’s liberation, 82–83 Pinochet, Augusto, 122 Plazeweska, Irene, 64 Poe, Edgar Allan, 177 police brutality, 2–3, 3, 115–16, 118–19, 151 Pollock, Jackson, 44 pop art, 97, 99, 105, 107, 192, 198 pornography, 210–11, 213 P-Orridge, Genesis artistic approach, 209–10, 216 in court, 212 on criminality, 212–13 gender transformation, 218–20 porno postcards, 210–11 Venus Mount/Mound, 216–17, plate 16 You Are My Other Half, 218, plate 17 poster art, psychedelic, 199, plate 15 Powell, James, 115 Powers, Richard M., 200 Poynor, Rick, 198 Prague Spring (1968), 64 Prévert, Jacques, 44 Prima, Diane di, Revolutionary Letters, 69 Private Eye (magazine), 194 Progressive Labor Party, 115–16 Promenade de Venus, La (Paris), 62 Prostitution (exhibition; ICA, London), 213–16, 214, plate 16 Provo movement, 48–49, 124n12 psychedelia, 36, 192, 194–95, 198 psychedelic poster art, 199, plate 15 punk movement, 207–9, 215–16, 217–18, 220–21 See also COUM Transmissions Pynchon, Thomas, 179 race riots, 114, 115–17, 118–19, 123 racial fetishization, 51–52, 197 Radcliffe, Charles, 66 Don’t Start Me Talking, 64 Radical America (journal), 62, 162, plate 5 Ragon, Michel, 99, 103 Rammel, Hal, 163 “Direct Action Gets the Goods,” 168, 168 “Unjust Dominion” (with Litherland), 167 Rauschenberg, Robert Art of Assemblage, inclusion at, 104 Benayoun on, 105, 107 documenta 2 and, 94–95 EROS, inclusion at, 93–94, 95–96 interview with Parinaud, 102–3 Index

Rauschenberg, Robert (continued) Pierre on, 98, 103–4, 106, 107, 108, 109 solo show at Castelli Gallery, 99 solo show at Galerie Daniel Cordier, 101–2, 105 solo show at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, 108 Surrealist Intrusion, inclusion at, 98 on surrealists, 92 Bed, 94–96, 96, 98–99, 109 Canyon, 105–6, plate 10 Gloria, 93 Pilgrim, 103–4 Untitled (de Gaulle), 102 Raysse, Martial, 102 Read, Herbert, Surrealism, 191 Rebel Women, 68–69 Rebel Worker (journal), 157, 159, 162 Red Rose Bookstore (Chicago), 69 Reich, Wilhelm, 193 Reid, Jamie, 207 Reid, Norman, 212 reproduction, and marriage, 84–85, 87 Resnais, Alain, 135 Restany, Pierre, 103 Restless, Randall, “Common Ground,” 165–66 Revel, J.-F., 76 Reverdy, Pierre, 106 revolutionary romanticism, 20–24 Rexroth, Kenneth, 161 Richards, Keith, 192 Richardson, Michael, 72 Richter, Hans, Dada: Kunst und Antikunst, 95 Riebe, Ernest, 158 Rimbaud, Arthur, 55–56, 83, 144, 193 Rimbaud, Penny, 221 Rivera, Diego, 119 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 135 Rochefort, Christiane, Les petits enfants du siècle, 79 Roditi, Édouard, 177 Roediger, David, 69–70, 163 Haymarket Scrapbook (with Rosemont), 158 “Three Days That Shook the New World Order” (with Rosemont), 170–71 Wages of Whiteness, The, 70 Roeg, Nicolas, 199 romanticism, revolutionary, 20–24 Romero, George A., 182 Roosevelt University Wobbly chapter (IWW), 156–57 Rooum, Donald, Wildcat Anarchist Comics, 168 Rosemont, Franklin, 70 in core of Chicago group, 65 as editor of Arsenal, 159 as editor of Industrial Worker, 160, 162–63 as editor of Rebel Worker, 157 Joans and, 46, 55, 71 Marcuse and, 9, plate 2 Marvelous Freedom exhibition contribution, 68 Index

on nature, 162 at Oldenburg Batcolumn dedication, 69 in Paris, 4, 62–63 personal life, 71, 73n14 Roosevelt University Wobbly chapter establishment, 156 on surrealism, 7, 17, 62, 71–72 T-Bone Slim and, 157–58, 171 at Telos conference (1971), 64 Black, Brown, and Beige (with Kelley), 146, 147, 148, 152 “Earth First!ers, Meet the IWW”, 164 “Fellow Workers, Meet Earth First!”, 164 “May Day, Red, Black—and Green”, 163 Morning of a Machine Gun, The , 63 “Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons”, 158 “Situation of Surrealism in the U.S.A.”, 123 “Workers and Wilderness”, 164 Haymarket Scrapbook (with Roediger), 158 “Three Days That Shook the New World Order” (with Roediger), 170–71 Rosemont, Penelope, 70 Arsenal and, 159 at Bugs Bunny show, 37 on Chicago Surrealist Group, 7, 61–72 environmental activism, 169 Joans and, 55 in Paris, 4, 62–63 Wobbly affiliation, 156 “Psychopathology of Work, The”, 170 “Situation of Surrealism in the U.S.A.”, 123 Rosenberg, Harold, 34, 41n15, 41n42 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 121, 186 Rosenblum, Robert, 92–93 Rosenquist, James, 97 Ross, Kristin, 79, 84, 100, 109 Roszak, Theodore, 7–8, 9, 18n13 Rothwell, Brooke, 67, 70 Rothwell, Janine, 67, 69, 70 Rotten, Johnny, 207, 208, 220, 221 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 21 Roussel, Raymond, 177 Rubin, Jerry, 201 Rubin, William Chicago counter-exhibition and, 37 criticized for Dada exhibition, 32, 37, 39, 39–40 defense of Dada exhibition, 34, 35, 39, 41n42 on Matta’s Le vertige d’eros, 120 as MoMA curator, 30 Dada and Surrealist Art, 191 Ruche, La (journal), 145–46 Rudd, Roswell, 51 Sack, John, 2–3 Sade, Marquis de, 82–83, 144, 177, 178–79, 213 120 Days of Sodom, 178 Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue, 184 236

Sakolsky, Ron, 7, 10, 72 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 50, 121 Saturday Night Live (TV show), 185 Savage, Jon, 208, 209 RE/Search 6–7: Industrial Culture Handbook, 221 Schanoes, David, 64, 65 Schlechter Duvall, 62 Schuster, Jean, 14, 62, 64, 76, 101, 122, 129 Schwartz, Steven, 65 Schwarz, Arturo, Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 62 Schwitters, Kurt, 92, 104 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), 4, 62, 158 Seale, Bobby, 51 Sert, Josep Lluís, 119 Setzer, C. E., “Whooose Side Are You On?,” 167, 167 Severin, Steve, 215 Sex Pistols (music group), 207, 208, 209, 218 sexual liberation and eroticism in black humor, 180–81, 182, 184–85 children and, 202 conflation with social equality, 79, 80–83 in COUM’s art, 210–11, 213–15, 214, 216–17, plate 16 feminist polemics on, 81–82, 83, 202–3 fluid gender identity and, 218–20, plate 17 Fourier on, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86 homosexuality, 190 museum orgy concept, 86–87 racial, 51–52, 197 shifting popular views on, 85, 87 Shapiro, Fred C., 115 Sharp, Martin, 194, 195, 198–200, 203 Blowing in the Mind, 199 “Max the Birdman Ernst,” 199, plate 15 Shaw, Eddie, 68 Shepp, Archie, 43, 49, 50–51, 55 Shonibare, Yinka, 148, 149 sick humor, 179 Silbermann, Jean-Claude, 63, 79, 108, 109 Simmons, John, 64, 65 Simon, Roger, 69 Sinatra, Frank, 68 Singer, Daniel, 21 Siouxsie Sioux, 215, 220 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 120 Situationist International anticapitalist and revolutionary views, 130–34, 140n9 on failure of surrealism, 129, 130, 134–38 May ’68 uprising and, 21, 138–39 Oz magazine and, 195, 201 revolutionary romanticism and, 21, 23 on Watts riots, 118–19 Smith, Vincent, 151 Smith, Winston, 67 Solidarity Bookshop (Chicago), 67, 158–59 237

Sollers, Philippe, 100 Sollors, Werner, 45 Sonnabend, Ileana, 95, 102–3, 108 Southern, Terry, 2–3, 179 Candy (with Hoffenberg), 180–81, 184 Flash and Filigree, 184 Spanish Civil War, 119, 120 spectacle, the as concept, 132–33 situationist rejection of, 133–34 surrealism as part of, 135–36, 137 Speigler, Mado, 69, 71 Spencer, Rochelle, 155n29 Spivey, Victoria, 66 Springer, Frank, 184, 185 Spungen, Nancy, 71 Stanford, Max, Jr., 64 Stankiewicz, Richard, 105 Stella, Frank, 38 Sterling, Linder, 217 Sternberg, Jacques, 128, 129 Stewart, Joffre, 157 Student Peace Union, 159 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 4, 62, 158 Sullivan, James W., 115 Summer, Redwood, 160 Sun Ra, 54, 61, 149, 150, 151 Surréalisme (journal), 129 surréalisme: Sources, histoire, affinités, Le (exhibition; Galerie Charpentier, Paris), 13 “Surrealism—Is It Dead or Alive?” (debate), 128–30, 129 Surrealist Insurrection (journal), 4–6 Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain (exhibition; D’Arcy Galleries, New York), 97, 97–98 Surrealist Movement in the United States, 169 Survival of American Indians Association, 4–6 Svanberg, Max Walter, Portrait of a Star III, 96 Sviták, Ivan, 64 Swenson, Gene, 37–38 Swift, Jonathan, 177 “A Modest Proposal,” 178–79, 184 Tanguy, Yves, 121 Tanning, Dorothea, 119 Tarnac Nine, 169 Taub, Debra, 69, 70 Taylor, Cecil, 43, 49, 50, 68 T-Bone Slim, 61, 157–58, 164, 171 Telos group, 64–65 Terkel, Studs, 62 Thompson, Finn, 68, 70 Thompson, Fred, 162, 164 Throbbing Gristle (TG), 209, 221 See also COUM Transmissions Tinguely, Jean, 103, 135 Index

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 214 Die Tödliche Doris (music group), 217 Tomkins, Calvin, 94, 102 Toomer, Jean, 151 Townshend, Pete, 192 Toyen, 63, 80 Tribute to the 100th Anniversary of Hysteria (exhibition; Ozaukee Art Center, Milwaukee), 70 Tristan, Flora, 80 Trocchi, Alexander, 192, 193 Trotman, Nat, 221 Trouille, Clovis, 95 Truth About the Colonies (exhibition), 124n16 Tutti, Cosey Fanni, 209, 212, 214, 214–15, 220 Tzara, Tristan, 128 Urbani, Giovanni, 94 Vaché, Jacques-Pierre, 120, 176–77, 178 War Letters, 177 Vale, V., 67 Vancrevel, Laurens, 64 Vandelaar, Michael, 68 Vaneigem, Raoul, 23, 137, 138, 140n26, 193 Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, 87 Van Lier, Sofie, 49 Verlaine, Paul, 193 Vicious, Sid, 71, 220 Vietnam War black humor and, 180, 181 Matta and, 115, 122, 123 protests of Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage exhibition and, 30, 34 Vinkenoog, Simon, 48 violence colonial, 121–22, 143 fetishized, 180–81, 184–85, 216–17, plate 13, plate 16 police brutality, 2–3, 3, 115–16, 118–19, 151 Voltaire, Candide, 180 Voting Rights Act (1965), 118 Vries, Her de, 64 Waldberg, Patrick, 13 Waldman, Ann, 43 Walker, John A., 216 Wallace, Marian, 67 Walsh, Richard, 194 Walton, Mercy Dee, 66 Warhol, Andy, 185–87 Five Deaths Seventeen Times in Black and White, 186 Foot and Tire, 186

Index

129 Die in Jet!, 186 Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times, 186 Since, 186 Tunafish Disaster, 186–87, 187 Waters, John, 182 Watts riots (1965), 114, 116–17, 118–19, 123 Waymouth, Nigel, 196 Weinberg, Jack, 4 Weisberg, Laurence, 69 Welson, John, 72 Westwood, Vivienne, 217 What Will Be (Vries and Vancrevel), 64 Wheatstraw, Peetie, 66, 159 Whitaker, Robert, 195 Widgery, David, 193, 194, 203 Wiener, Jon, 116 Wiley, Kehinde, 149 Williams, Joel, 69–70 “Surrealism in the Service of Revolution (and Vice Versa),” 166, 167 Williams, Robert F., 54 Williamson, Sonny Boy, 66 Willis, Reggie, 68 Wilson, Andrew, 193 Wilson, Wes, 199 Winslow, Pete, 62 Winston, Mathew, “Humour Noir and Black Humor,” 179–80 Wobblies. See Industrial Workers of the World women fetishized violence against, 180–81, 184–85, 216–17, plate 13, plate 16 oppression vs. liberation of, 78–85, 202–3 Rebel Women group, 68–69 See also sexual liberation and eroticism Woodcock, George, 161 workers’ activism. See Industrial Workers of the World World Surrealist Exhibition (Gallery Black Swan, Chicago), 67–68, 148, 158, plate 6 World War I, 208 Woronov, Mary, 186 Wright, Michelle, 150 yippies (Youth International Party), 4, 201 Young, Lester, 51 Zap Comix (comic book series), 182 Zappa, Frank, 182 Zengakuren movement, 124n12 Zétwal (film), 147–48 Zürn, Unica, 203 Zwirner, Rudolf, 95

238

(A Series Edited By) Jonathan Eburne Refiguring Modernism features cutting-edge interdisciplinary approaches to the study of art, literature, science, and cultural history. With an eye to the different modernisms emerging throughout the world during the twentieth century and beyond, we seek to publish scholarship that engages creatively with canonical and eccentric works alike, bringing fresh concepts and original research to bear on modernist cultural production, whether aesthetic, social, or epistemological. What does it mean to study modernism in a global context characterized at once by decolonization and nation-building; international cooperation and conflict; changing ideas about subjectivity and identity; new understandings of language, religion, poetics, and myth; and new paradigms for science, politics, and religion? What did modernism offer artists, writers, and intellectuals? How do we theorize and historicize modernism? How do we rethink its forms, its past, and its futures? (Other Books in the Series) David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914

Juli Highfill, Modernism and Its Merchandise: The Spanish Avant-Garde and Material Culture, 1920–1930

Jordana Mendelson, Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929–1939

Damien Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication

Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon

Allison Morehead, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, eds., The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere

Laura Kalba, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art

Margaret Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes

Catherine Walworth, Soviet Salvage: Imperial Debris, Revolutionary Reuse, and Russian Constructivism

Stephen Bann, ed., The Coral Mind: Adrian Stokes’s Engagement with Architecture, Art History, Criticism, and Psychoanalysis Charles Palermo, Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miró in the 1920s Marius Roux, The Substance and the Shadow Aruna D’Souza, Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint Abigail Gillman, Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler Stephen Petersen, Space-Age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European Avant-Garde Stefanie Harris, Mediating Modernity: Literature and the “New” Media, 1895–1930 Michele Greet, Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy for Andean Art, 1920–1960 Paul Smith, ed., Seurat Re-viewed David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson, eds., Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity David Getsy, From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art Jessica Burstein, Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art Adam Jolles, The Curatorial Avant-Garde: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France, 1925–1941

Jo Applin, Catherine Spencer, and Amy Tobin, eds., London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980 Erik M. Bachman, Literary Obscenities: U.S. Case Law and Naturalism After Modernism Lori Cole, Surveying the Avant-Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz, eds., Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism Sam Rose, Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism Diederik Oostdijk, Bells for America: The Cold War, Modernism, and the Netherlands Carillon in Arlington Jessica Gerschultz, Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power Anna Lovatt, Drawing Degree Zero: The Line from Minimal to Conceptual Art Molly Warnock, Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting Octavio González, Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel Mark Antliff, Sculptors Against the State: Anarchism and the Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde (London-Milan-Paris)