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
Filtering by
- Creators: Walker, Ian
- Creators: Elder, Bruce (R. Bruce)
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 2 No. 2 (2008) - Table of Contents
“Surrealism and Photography: Introduction” by Wendy Grossman, p. i-iv.
“‘Surrealistic and disturbing’: Timothy O’Sullivan as Seen by Ansel Adams in the 1930s” by Britt Salvesen, p. 162-179.
“‘As if one’s eyelids had been cut away’: Frederick Sommer’s Arizona Landscapes” by Ian Walker, p. 180-208.
“Clarence John Laughlin, Regionalist Surrealist” by Lewis Kachur, p. 209-226.
“A Swimmer Between Two Worlds: Francesca Woodman’s Maps of Interior Space” by Katharine Conley, p. 227-252.
“Remembering Anne D’Harnoncourt” by Valery Oisteanu, p. 253.
“The 1930s: The Making of the ‘New Man’” by Julia Pine, p. 254-258.
“Beyond Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch” by Robert McNab, p. 259-262.
“Review of Kirby Olson, ‘Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America’” by Éva Forgács, p. 263-267.
“Review of Sally Price, 'Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly’” by Kate Duncan, p. 268-272.
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014) - Table of Contents
“Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Surrealism and Documentary Photography” by Ian Walker, p. 1-27.
“(Sur)real or Unreal?: Antonin Artaud in the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico” by Lars Krutak, p. 28-50.
“Surrealist Views, American Landscapes: Notes on Wolfgang Paalen’s Ruin Gazing” by Kent L. Dickson, p. 51-73.
“‘Don’t Forget I Come From the Tropics’: Reconsidering the Surrealist Sculpture of Maria Martins” by Michael R. Taylor, p. 74-89.
“‘Le centre du milieu’: Matta and the Exploding Dome” by Denise Birkhofer, p. 90-104.
“Edward James and Plutarco Gastélum in Xilita: Critical Paranoia in the Mexican Jungle” by Irene Herner, p. 105-123.
“Review of Ellen Landau, ‘Mexico and American Modernism’” by Luis M. Castañeda, p. 124-126.
“‘Surrealist Ghosts and Spectrality in Surrealist Ghostliness’ by Katharine Conley” by Martine Antle, p. 127-129.
“Review of Roger Rothman, ‘Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Aesthetics of the Small’” by Jonathan S. Wallis, p. 130-135.
“Review of ‘Late Surrealism’: The Menil Collection, May 24- August 25, 2013” by Rachel Hooper, p. 136-139.
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.
When André Breton went to Mexico in 1938, he saw the photographs of Manuel Álvarez Bravo, took a set of them back with him to France and, the following year, published and exhibited them as part of his espousal of Mexico as “the surrealistic place par excellence.” That is the first reason why the work of Álvarez Bravo cannot be overlooked in the broader context of Surrealism. This circumstance, often cited, has rarely been analyzed in any depth and part of the aim of this essay is to undertake that analysis.
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.
In New York in 1944, the Surrealist magazine VVV published two photographs of the Arizona desert by Frederick Sommer. They are radical images in their minimalism and intensity of attention to (apparently) very little.
Sommer’s immediate connection was with Max Ernst, who saw these pictures when he visited Arizona in 1943. Later, when Ernst came to live at Sedona, the two men influenced each other’s work. Yves Tanguy also visited in 1951 and J. T. Soby suggested that the ‘breathless congestion of boulders, pebbles and bones’ in Tanguy’s last paintings derive from his experience of the desert as viewed through Sommer’s photographs.
Even in Europe, where Surrealism was predominantly urban, there had been an interest in the extreme landscapes of desert or jungle. But while Salvador Dali transformed rock forms into bodies, the challenge of the desert as Sommer depicted it was that no such transformation was possible. In addition, there was a Surrealist fascination with the "terrain vague"—land which is formless, void of composition—and it would be intriguing to extend the idea to Sommer’s desert pictures, which equally irritate the eye with their apparent lack of organization and focus.
It was Sommer’s meeting with Edward Weston that led to his use of a 10 x 8” camera to create the intensity of these pictures. But Sommer’s sense of the violence of the desert was at odds with the positive way it was depicted by Weston or Ansel Adams and his work was written out of photographic history for a long time. It’s no accident that it was rediscovered in the 1970s, when the myth of the American West was subjected to a severe critique and it’s intriguing to also place Sommer’s photographs in a lineage that goes back to Timothy O’Sullivan and forward to Richard Misrach.
Sommer’s work stands then at the intersection between the photography of the American West and Surrealism - between Edward Weston and Max Ernst. But it is also quite unlike either and, in their unflinching gaze at a subject that is both intense and empty, Sommer’s Arizona Landscapes profoundly undermine the conventions of vision.