So Ya Wannabe a Surrealist? Part 2. The S Word and Other Contentious Issues

 SO YA WANNABE A SURREALIST? PART 2. THE S WORD AND OTHER CONTENTIOUS ISSUES

The word is 'surreal'. Like "It's so surreal!" meaning what exactly? I hate the word because it is a flabby meaningless word that slinks around the dark corners of dictionaries and signifies whatever people want it to signify, or not. Most surrealists don't use the word because of this vague and fluffy concept of...something weird, a bit unreal. "We took loads of sleeping pills and booze and everything looked so surreal", that sort of thing.

The trouble is, this is pretty much the opposite of what is meant by Surrealism, or by surreality.  Think of the idea as being a sort of 'open totality' of reality bound together with the imaginary, the waking with the dream.

But don't take my word for it, let's juxtapose the "kinda weird" definition of 'surreal' with Andre Breton's definition in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. This is the absolute classic passage where Breton goes beyond the original definition in the 1924 Manifesto, of "pure psychic automatism" and embraces a dialectical approach to the problems of existence:

"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future. the communicable and the incommunicable. high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point. From this it becomes obvious how absurd it would be to define Surrealism solely as constructive or destructive: the point to which we are referring is a fortiori that point where construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other. It is also clear that Surrealism is not interested in giving very serious consideration to anything that happens outside of itself, under the guise of art, or even anti-art, of philosophy or anti-philosophy-in short, of anything not aimed at the annihilation of the being into a diamond, all blind and interior, which is no more the soul of ice than that of fire." (Andre Breton. (1929) Second Manifesto of Surrealism.)

I want to impress on you both the intensity and the grandeur of this vision...and I have quite forgotten to tell any jokes...

Another frequent mistake is the equation of Salvador Dali with Surrealism. Dali was indeed involved with Surrealism for a few years, made a significant contribution, but increasingly promoted himself as the surrealist, to the expense of other surrealists and the movement itself while slipping to the far right to the extent that he praised Franco. André Breton famously made an anagram of his name, Avida Dollars. Perhaps I should devote an article to Dali, explaining fully why I dislike him and his work, but really I think it is enough to just say that he was a fascist and a racist who prostituted his undoubted talent and made a great many shitty paintings with immaculate technique. What do they say? Fuck that guy!

Another thing I might as well deal with now is the "last/lost surrealist syndrome". I have seen this for as long as I can remember, well, as far back as the 70s anyway. In that instance it was  André Masson who was described in a newspaper article as the last surrealist, despite the fact that there were a great many older surrealists still going. I have seen it trotted out frequently since then.

I noticed that there will be an event at Tate Modern devoted to Leonora Carrington "England's Lost Surrealist." Who lost her exactly? I remember a splendid retrospective exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery back in 1990, I think it was. Virago published most, if not all, of her writings, and they were pretty popular. She'd had a considerable following for several years before that, in part due to Whitney Chadwick's "Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement", a rather wretched book in many ways, but at least important for bringing a number of women artists to the public's attention. Leonora had, it has to be said, been very well known to surrealists for many years, but as establishment views were that surrealists were obsolete, various important surrealists had to be made profitable before they could be given publicity. So, over the years, a number of really quite wonderful women surrealists have been 'discovered'. A few works, like Amy Hale's book on Ithell Colquhoun, are real treasures, many less so.

If we are to have a sort of award for works presenting women surrealists, it must go the Penelope Rosemont's epic Women Surrealists, which accounts for, I think, over 100, and attempts to give some context to writers, painters, thinkers and activists. I'm not sure it is wholly successful, but it is a hugely ambitious book and could never be wholly successful. It is, however, wholly necessary for anybody who wants a compendious account of women in the surrealist movement. It counteracts the misleading impressions of Chadwick's volume, and that is a good start.

Here it is, now, if you don't already have a copy, you need to hunt it down  and acquire it before making any comments about women and Surrealism...I mean, read it, don't just buy it, right?