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: Elder, Bruce (R. Bruce)
- Creators: Nowak, Lars
General Topics Issue No. 2
Cover Image: Kati Horna, S.NOB #1 cover, 1962, ink on paper. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Mexico City, Mexico
Published: 2021-04-19
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 11 No. 2 (2020) - Table of Contents
"Agustín Cárdenas: Sculpting the 'Memory of the Future' by Susan L. Power, p. 98-119.
"Bataillean Surrealism in Mexico: S.NOB Magazine (1962)" by David A.J. Murrieta Flores, p. 120-151.
"Mexican Carnival: Profanations in Luis Buñuel's Films Nazarín and Simón del desierto" by Lars Nowak, p. 152-177.
"Giorgio de Chirico, the First Surrealist in Mexico?" by Carlos Segoviano, p. 178-197?
"Exhibition Review: 'I Paint My Reality: Surrealism in Latin America' by Danielle M. Johnson, p. 198-204.
This article adds to previous interpretations of Luis Buñuel’s ambiguous attitude towards Christianity by means of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of profanation as developed in his theory of carnivalism. Earlier approaches to Buñuel have either paid too little attention to the question of how his Mexican films, the largest share of his work, were influenced by the cultural context of their production, or they have explicitly denied such an influence. In contrast, this essay tries to demonstrate, on the basis of Nazarín (1959) and Simón del desierto (1965), that Buñuel’s textual strategies of profanation were informed by his experiences as an emigrant in the United States and Mexico, and by ideas concerning the Mexican amalgamation of Spanish Catholicism and indigenous religious beliefs. The title characters of both films, a Catholic priest and an ancient stylite, have chosen lifestyles that are meant to bring them closer to God, but alienate them from their fellow men and their own physical existence. Yet, both movies restore their protagonists’ ordinary humanness and connection to material reality with the help of various carnivalesque profanations that find expression in spatial movements within the vertical as well as the horizontal dimension. The horizontal movements comprise the micro- and the macro-geographical level and link the old world with the new world, which includes both the Mexican countryside and New York City. The essay uses these observations to compare Buñuel with other European Surrealists in Mexican exile, who shared his ambivalence towards religion, but sometimes lacked the high degree of critical differentiation with which he looked at Mexican culture.
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 9 No. 1 (2016) - Table of Contents
“Anemic Cinema: Dada/Surrealism and Film in the Americas: Introduction to the Cinema Issue” by Samantha Kavky, p. i-iii.
“‘Polycythemia,’ or Surrealist Intertextuality in the Light of Cinematic ‘Anemia’” by Robert J. Belton, p. 1-13.
“Modern Architecture Will Help You” by Ana María León, p, 14-39.
“Radio Transmission: Electricity and Surrealist Art in 1950s and ‘60s San Francisco” by R. Bruce Elder, p. 40-61.
“Surrealism in the Autobiographical Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky: Dance of Reality (La Danza de la realidad, 2013) and Endless Poetry (Poesía sin fin, 2016)” by George Melnyk, p. 62-66.
“Review of Wolfgang Paalen, ‘Form and Sense’ with an Introduction by Martica Sawin” by Ellen G. Landau, p. 67-72.
Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, Cinema Issue (2016)
This paper deals with a version of Surrealism that emerged in San Francisco in the late 1940s, and its influence on Wallace Berman’s film Aleph (1966) and Harry Smith’s Early Abstractions.
Many San Francisco poets of the 1940s through the 1970s understood poets as a visionary company possessing a nearly sacerdotal authority arising from their capacity to put aside the individual self and open themselves to influences from beyond—in a peculiar turn, these influences came to be understood as energy waves that are transmitted through the ether and operate the poet/artist—and cinema and the radio became models for these transmissions. The collage art that resulted was understood as anemic, cobbled together from insecurely apprehended fragments of thought carried in radio signals nearly drowned out by static. I conclude with comments relating the idea of artists’ feeble imaginations being operated by remote control to film and electric media.