Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA)
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas focuses on the subject of modern European and American intellectuals’ obsession with the “New World.” This obsession—the very heart of Surrealism—extended not only to North American sites, but also to Latin America, the Caribbean, and to the numerous indigenous cultures located there. The journal invites essays that examine aspects of the actual and fantasized travel of these European and American intellectuals throughout the Americas, and their creative response to indigenous art and culture, including their anthropological and collecting activities, and their interpretations of the various geographic, political, and cultural landscapes of the Americas. We furthermore intend to investigate the interventions / negotiations / repudiations of European/American or other Surrealisms, by indigenous as well as other artists, writers and filmmakers. Original publication is available at: Journal of Surrealism and the Americas
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- Creators: Drost, Julia, 1969-
- Creators: Greet, Michele M.
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 10 No. 1 (2019) - Table of Contents
“Introduction to the Special Issue on Max Ernst” by Samantha Kavky, p. 1-6.
“Napoleon in the Wilderness: The Transmogrification of a Picture by Max Ernst” by Martin Schieder, p. 7-23.
“Seeing Through an (American) Temperament: Max Ernst’s Microbes, 1946-1953” by Danielle M. Johnson, p. 24-45.
“Max Ernst and the Aesthetic of Commercial Tourism: Max Among Some of His Favorite Dolls” by Carolyn Butler Palmer, p, 46-68.
“Arizona Dream: Maxime Rossi Meets Max Ernst” by Julia Drost, p. 69-83.
“Glowing Like Phosphorus: Dorothea Tanning and the Sedona Western” by Catriona McAra, p. 84-105.
“Conference Review: ‘SURREALISMS: the Inaugural Conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism’” by Kristen Strange, p. 106-110.
“Exhibition Review of ‘A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago’” by Jennifer R. Cohen, p. 111-114.
“Exhibition Review: ‘Native American Art at Documenta 14 and the Issue of Democracy’” by Claudia Mesch, p. 115-120.
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 7 No. 1 (2013) - Table of Contents
“Introduction to the Issue and Special Section on Native American Surrealisms” by Claudia Mesch, p. i-iv.
“George Morrison’s Surrealism” by W. Jackson Rushing III, p. 1-18.
“César Moro’s Transnational Surrealism” by Michele Greet, p. 19-51.
“A Modernist Moment: Native Art and Surrealism at the University of Oklahoma” by Mark A. White, p. 52-70.
“The Opposite of Snake: Surrealism and the Art of Jimmie Durham” by Mary Modeen, p. 71-95.
“‘My World is Surreal,’ or ‘The Northwest Coast’ is Surreal” by Charlotte Townsend-Gault, p. 96-107.
“Complexity and Contradiction in Native American Surrealism” by Robert Silberman, p. 108-130.
“Review of ‘Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy’ & Kay Sage, ‘The Biographical Chronology and Four Surrealist One Act Plays’” by Larry List, p. 131-134.
Known primarily as a surrealist poet, César Moro also created numerous paintings and collages in a surrealist mode. Born in Peru, Moro made the obligatory sojourn to Paris in 1925 to immerse himself in European avant-garde activities. In 1928 he met André Breton and began to experiment with surrealist technique as a means to push both his painting and his poetry in new directions. Moro was one of the first Latin American artists to take up collage as an autonomous art form, creating images that combine text with photographs from advertisements, scientific journals, and newspapers in bizarrely incongruous ways.
When he returned to Peru, Moro organized the first exhibition of surrealist art in Latin America at the Academía Alcedo in Lima, Peru in 1935. Given the dominance of Indigenism in the visual arts in Peru, this was a bold move on Moro’s part. While the exhibition baffled the public, it introduced new possibilities to young artists working in Peru and challenged the ascendancy of Indigenism. In 1938 Moro left Peru for Mexico where he would remain for the next decade. There he renewed his contact with Breton and the two joined forces, together with the painter Wolfgang Paalen, to organize the Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in 1940.
This essay will trace César Moro’s extensive engagement with surrealism, from his early participation in Breton’s surrealist group in Paris, to the exhibition he organized in Peru, and finally to Mexico. By examining closely Moro’s surrealist collages and paintings, I hope to reveal the depth of his involvement with the movement, as an artist, poet, and organizer on a transnational scale.
This essay analyses the 22:40 minute video Real Estate Astrology (2015) of Maxime Rossi (born in 1980), a contemporary artist's response to the life and work of the German born surrealist Max Ernst. Rossi sets out in this vide, produced in the color filter technique of anaglyph projection, to search for Ernst’s traces in Sedona, Arizona. The surrealist artist lived here in exile together with his wife, the American painter Dorothea Tanning, from 1946 to 1953. Maxime Rossi shows a predilection for historical artists, whose works he uses as a point of departure in his work, in which historical facts and fiction are inextricably overlapping. In Sedona, Rossi goes to the places Max Ernst is said by locals Rossi has met several times to have visited: a hut where the surrealist is said to have spent the night from time to time, a stick that is said to have belonged to him, a cave with prehistoric mural paintings that he is said to have seen. Eventually, Ernst’s horoscope is said to have predestined a particularly fertile time for him in Arizona. But as we will see, all the tracks prove to be intentionally misplaced traces that confront the viewer with a hallucinatory world that mixes the real with the unreal, historical facts with the fictitious. What ultimately results is a hybrid whole that incorporates different sources and materials and oscillates between the banal and the fantastical, and between fiction and reality. And in doing so, he follows surrealist esthetics and strategies of alienation as we find them especially in Ernst’s collage works. A trans-epochal dialogue between the historical conditions of Ernst’s exile on the one hand, and the actual present on the other, runs through Real Estate Astrology, giving us two periods within the unit of the video.