A Mirror to the
Debutante
While I enjoyed both issues of the new journal The Debutante, I do
also have several problems with it, one of which is its declared nature as a
journal of “feminist-surrealism”. The first issue contains a very brief
“Feminist-Surrealist Manifesto” which does nothing much to clarify the editors’
relationship to Surrealism as the journal and its contributors seem to be
ignorant of contemporary Surrealism.
As a man writing about a publication, almost entirely by
women, and avowedly feminist, I would not wish to be disparaging about either,
however, a magazine that calls itself surrealist and yet seems to have so
little awareness of much of surrealism seems to me to be asking for trouble.
The most obvious problem with
the term ‘feminist-surrealist’ is not that it foregrounds feminism, but that it
implies that other surrealists are not feminist. This is not only simply wrong,
but seems to me rather insulting to the many women who have been involved in
the surrealist movement over the course of a century.
What knowledge of surrealism they demonstrate is mostly
historical and that mostly art-historical. They seem to want to claim a lot of
very disparate women artists and some art historians as ‘feminist-surrealists’
who challenge “the patriarchal structures of canonical surrealism”
At this point I have to ask “What patriarchal structures?” I see nothing in surrealism as such
that is inherently male, masculinist or patriarchal. Perhaps I’m being blind
here, but if so I need accurate analyses of these factors, not only to be aware
of them, but in order to help dismantle them. What we do have to acknowledge is
that surrealism was almost entirely founded by men, they were mostly
disaffected and traumatised young men who, in the wake of the Great War wished
to find, not new ways of making art, but new ways of living and understanding
life, an effort that required a revolution. It is impossible to doubt that,
despite their youth and their intent, they carried a great deal of cultural
baggage with them. They were born at the end of the 19th century and
many of the early works show, at best, a lack of clarity on gender issues. The
volume Investigating Sex does
André Breton few
favours, for instance, but many commentators have reacted as if comments made
in a discussion in the late 20s were definitive of the status of women in
surrealism, and the last word on the subject. This view needs to be challenged.
What is especially disconcerting about The Debutante is that
they seem oblivious to Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Women which,
over 20 years ago addressed many of their concerns and, I think I am right in
saying this, in presenting the work of over 100 women surrealists, was a
corrective to the biased and inaccurate account of Whitney Chadwick’s Women
Artists and the Surrealist Movement. However, even Rosemont had to admit to
little evidence of surrealist activity by women a hundred years ago, though
there were contributors to surrealist journals such as Nancy Cunard, and we
should always mention Simone Breton, who was at the centre of the original
group, not merely an appendage of André.
Successive decades of surrealist activity have shown an
ever-growing proportion of women involved, and to the point where, in some
groups, there is not only equity, but women can even outnumber men, and not
just as artists or poets, but as theoreticians and political activists. Just as
a very random sample, I might mention Emila Medkova, Suzanne Cesaire, Nora
Mitrani, Eva Svankmajerova, Joyce Mansour, Jayne Cortez, Sarah Metcalf, Merl
Fluin, Casi Cline and , Annie Le Brun.
The last named has actually been described as an
‘anti-feminist’, which I think is a considerable misunderstanding. Le Brun
wrote a number of texts, mostly published in a volume Lachez Tout which
lambasts the popular feminism of the time. For Le Brun, much of what passed for
feminism was a sell-out and an inverted image of patriarchy, substituting an
equally oppressive Matriarchy for Big Daddy. Establishment feminism could be said
to point to the ‘glass ceiling’ and demand that women join the boardrooms of
great corporations in much greater numbers, and while there are boardrooms, it
is hard to argue against female representation there, but the point, surely, is
for men and women alike to abolish boardrooms?
Put differently, for me, the point is not to dismiss identity
politics as irrelevant, but not to regard identity issues as separate from the
central political and social issues either. A genuinely radical movement will
always be in favour of the liberation of women, ethnic minorities, gays and
other sexualities, the disabled…everybody, in fact. It only works if those
various groups, rather than focus entirely on their own particular concerns as
black, gay, female, whatever, consider liberation as a whole, how it applies to
each and every group, and to each other. Anything else fragments and fails.
There’s another problem, the often fraught question of who is
a surrealist. This is sometimes framed as a seemingly narrow question of
identity and I know that Merl Fluin, for instance, has pointed out a number of
times that Georges Bataille was not a surrealist. In the most literal sense,
this is certainly true, and I think that Merl’s concern here is less with
establishing an overly dogmatic judgement on the issue as much as defending
surrealism against misconceptions such as those revealed in Hal Foster’s
Compulsive Beauty
which posits a “Bretonian Surrealism” and a “Bataillean Surrealism” going head
to head in a sort of battle for supremacy. This ignores the facts that Bataille
didn’t call himself a surrealist and many of his colleagues were far from being
surrealist in any way whatsoever. I have known people to attack surrealism on
the basis of Bataille’s and his friends, actions and ideas rather than those of
Breton and the people who actually identified as surrealists, and when one of
those people associated with Bataille proposes a ‘sur-fascism’ – I hope you see
my point. However, we also have to remember that not only did Breton and
Bataille collaborate on Contre-Attaque, but later became friends and Breton
invited Bataille to collaborate in both the 1947 and 1959 International
Surrealist Exhibitions. Bataille referred to himself as surrealism’s ‘old enemy
from within’, not in order to simply destroy it, but to undermine what he saw
as it’s too idealistic elements and to
remake its more revolutionary and experiential components over its artistic
ones. Many surrealists have considered Bataille as an expression of the
surrealist spirit and even as an opposite pole to Breton in that spirit, which
at the very least suggests that we should consider being surrealist in terms
other than simple identity.
Another aspect of the same problem that I have often
encountered is when somebody contacts me, ostensibly about surrealism, and
promptly enthuses about an artist with few, if any, links to surrealism. If we
include that artist’s own comments on the matter, the conversation might go
like this.
Fan: “I love X, X is my favourite surrealist!”
X: “I am not a surrealist, I don’t much like surrealism.”
Me: “X is not a surrealist”
Fan: “You are SOOO narrow-minded!”
You see the problem. The easiest solution would seem to be to
ask, when the person did not themselves identify as a surrealist, or
participate in surrealist activities, whether they are of surrealist interest.
As an example, consider Malcolm De Chazal. His religious ideas kept him
separate from the surrealists, but his ideas were crucial to thinking about
poetic analogy in the post-war period. He is, in many ways, alongside
surrealism, there were real points of contact and influence. Like Bataille, but
in a very different way, he can’t be considered wholly apart from surrealism,
and surrealism would be poorer without him, but he can’t be wholly subsumed
within surrealism either. It would be disrespectful to the person as well as
detrimental to the truth.
The artists included in The Debutante are often asked about
the ways in which they are ‘feminist-surrealists’. This presupposes that they
do identify as such and I am afraid that too often their responses are not very
enlightening, show little knowledge of contemporary surrealism – and usually
not much of it historically either – and usually are not questioned in any
depth as to what this might mean.
This might all be seen as a hostile critique of The
Debutante, I don’t feel it is, however. I remember, with some embarrassment,
things I said and wrote in my earliest days identifying as a surrealist. My
naiveté was
considerable, my heart was in the right place, and, fortunately, few saw my
more stupid statements. Armed with more knowledge and slightly more
intellectual sophistication, I am not sure I avoided saying anything stupid
either. The question here is whether the editors of The Debutante are willing
to undergo a thorough revision of their initial attitudes, or stick with what,
in expression at any rate, is a fundamental misconception of surrealism. I think that if they choose the former, a
dialogue might be fruitful, not in selling a feminist surrealism, but in
articulating a surrealist feminism and making that more explicit and developed
could be interesting indeed.
