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Abstract
In mid-January 1925, André Breton published an editorial, “La dernière grève” (The Last Strike) in the opening pages of the second issue of the new Parisian journal he helped produce, La Révolution surréaliste (Surrealist revolution). Breton’s essay discusses the tentative economic value of cultural and intellectual production in the capitalist economy and calls for artists, philosophers, and scholars to undertake a general strike for a period lasting between several nights to one year. Breton’s “Last Strike” essay influenced another and much more well-known call for an art strike by a French writer who was closely aligned with surrealism, Alain Jouffroy. The purpose of this essay is to analyze Breton’s 1925 “Last Strike” essay in relation to Jouffroy’s late 1960s statements on the art strike and the revolutionary abolition of art, in order to determine the differences and similarities between their approaches, and to demonstrate how surrealism is essential to Jouffroy’s theories about the abolition of art as a key aspect of anticapitalist culture.
Abstract
The Surrealist movement in Paris has kept alive, since the early 1970s, the red and black flame of rebellion, the antiauthoritarian dream of radical freedom, the poetical insubordination to the powers that be, and the obstinate desire to reenchant the world. Unfortunately, most academic or mainstream accounts of surrealism take it for granted that the group dissolved itself in 1969. It is quite strange that this attitude persisted despite the very visible presence of the surrealist movement in Paris after 1970. Historians have been trying to decree the end of surrealism for years. For most of them, surrealism was nothing else than one of the innumerous artistic vanguards, such as Cubism or Futurism.
Abstract
Allen Van Newkirk sought to revitalize the surrealists’ project of transforming everyday life with practices inspired by the series of riots that swept across the United States in the 1960s. Although largely forgotten, Van Newkirk was once a key figure in the underground press, helping to shape the counterculture’s understanding of surrealism’s relationship to contemporary social movements. This article draws on archival research and interviews with Van Newkirk’s collaborators in order to reconstruct his surrealist life. His direct-action approach to surrealism is examined through a close reading of his best-known act, the mock assassination of the poet Kenneth Koch. This provocative action, organized with the anarchist group Black Mask, exemplifies their combined attempt to extricate surrealism from its legacy in the art world and wield it as an insurrectionary weapon. Riot-inspired actions like this one led Van Newkirk to develop a concept of poetry that was identical to revolution.
Abstract
This article explores the work of Gee Vaucher. Vaucher is best known for her work with the band Crass but has an extensive range of work from the 1960s until the present. The article delves into Vaucher’s relationship with surrealism, through her project A Week of Knots (2013–2022). In this project, Vaucher uses the psychoanalytic insights of R.D. Laing to rewrite Max Ernst’s collage novel, Une semaine de bonté. Doing so provides a space for Vaucher to explore the nature of violence, power, and care, among many other aspects. What can we learn from Vaucher’s collaging practice that combines influences from Ernst and Laing? And what can this way of using that backdrop as a kind of collective psychoanalytic tool tell us about the family’s changing nature?
Abstract
Surrealism has always emphasized revelatory experience over abstract theory. The importance of art and poetry to the movement is the relation to the world they enact, as the images themselves are always relational, a rapprochement, and not simply mimetic of the look of things. The 1942 text “Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not” reconceptualizes politics away from the leadership of political parties and toward a time when politics, knowledge, and imagination are brought into and kept in relation to one another, and which are always seen through the prism of relationality: of how we live in the world.
Abstract
In 1966, the Colombian poet Gonzalo Arango published the article “Jazz para una misa negra por el alma de André Breton” [Jazz for a Black Mass for the Soul of André Breton] in Bogotá. In the text, he paid homage to the French poet and declared him “an impossible corpse”. Arango was the founder of the literary and artistic avant-garde movement called Nadaísmo that surfaced in Colombia in the 1950s. Its members were self-declared “cultural guerrillas” and established as their target moralism in politics, aesthetics, and social issues using the arts as their weapon. This article explores Nadaísmo’s ideological links to French Surrealism and its revolutionary spirit by examining the life of the group and the ideas exposed in the first and second nadaist manifestos.
Abstract
The global symbolic destitution that was at the core of the revolutionary months of May and June 1968 forced the Parisian surrealist group to entirely rethink its vocabulary and means of action. The aim of this article is to study these fundamental evolutions marking a shift in surrealism’s history regarding its relationship to an avant-gardist conception of revolution, still inherited, despite the rupture with the French Communist Party, from a Leninist scope. The Paris Surrealist collective, as such, was no longer effective and dissolved itself in the protest movement. Analyzing surrealist commitments in different action committees allows us to understand how these organizing structures representative of May ’68 confront surrealism, including its own internal functioning. It also gives new clues for understanding the dissolution, a few months later, of the Parisian surrealist group.