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: Grossman, Wendy A.
- Creators: Lusty, Natalya Frances
This essay reconsiders Remedios Varo's work within the context of her lifelong fascination with science as well as the broader epistemological and metaphysical questions driving the intellectual innovations of the 20th century. Varo's commercial illustration and late painting explicitly draw on the new physics, the hidden world of microbiology, the speculations of metaphysics, the world of engineering and mechanical design, as well as the intricate labor of the domestic sciences and crafts, as a way to explore the relationship between science and art on the one hand, and the old and the new on the other. In moving beyond the familiar rhetoric mystical, inspired, dream-like, esoteric that often accompanies an appreciation of Varo's work, this essay explores her interest in a range of scientific themes and intellectual ideas which were central to the Surrealist movement's interdiscplinary engagement.
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.
Man Ray’s virtually unknown photographs of a much celebrated Aztec birthing figure commonly identified as Tlazolteotl—the goddess of earth, sex, and childbirth in Aztec mythology—provide the springboard for exploring a body of little known photographs of non-Western objects the artist created in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s. Integrating his images of objects from indigenous peoples of the “New World” into his photographic repertoire of other non-Western objects, this article reveals the context and manner in which art of the Americas became a vehicle for his creative expression alongside objects from Africa and Oceania. Turning his camera lens to such objects, Man Ray produced images that—through a symbiotic relationship of content and form— imbued the objects with the same modernist aesthetic he pioneered in his photographs. In so doing, he created a new type of photography that defies categorization and functions ambiguously in the gap between the ethnographic and the surreal. This body of images provides both a window into the way in which such cultural artifacts became enmeshed in transatlantic artistic practices of the interwar period and insight into the role of his photographic endeavors in that process. The recovery of Man Ray’s photographs of the “Tlazolteotl” figure from obscurity and the examination of his engagement with the indigenous arts of the Americas allow new assessment of the work of this artist and contribute to a comprehensive understanding of his innovative approach to photographing objects of non-Western art.
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.
In keeping with the first two issues of the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, this third issue aims to broaden the horizon of critical concerns to which the publication is dedicated, turning our attention here to photographic contributions to the discourse of Surrealism and the Americas. Photography, of course, played a central role in surrealist practices since the movement’s inception, as the plethora of scholarship on the topic has underscored. It is thus not surprising that as the movement gained adherents across the Atlantic, the medium would find its calling in this new context as well.
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 2 No. 1 (2008) - Table of Contents
“Surrealism and Ethnography: Introduction” by Amy H. Winter, p. i-vi.
“Totemic Landscapes and Vanishing Cultures Through the Eyes of Wolfgang Paalen and Kurt Seligmann” by Marie Mauzé, p. 1-24.
“Surrealist Visions of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Legacy of Colonialism: the Good, the (Revalued) Bad, and the Ugly” by Keith Jordan, p. 25-63.
“Surrealism and Inuit Art: The Fascination of the Far North” by Florence Duchemin-Pelletier, p. 64-94.
“Bound Objects and Blurry Boundaries: Surrealist Display and (Anti)Nationalism” by Susan Power, p. 95-113.
“Man Ray’s Lost and Found Photographs: Arts of the Americas in Context” by Wendy Grossman, p. 114-139.
“T.J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp” by Bradley Bailey, p. 140-144.
“The Dalí Renaissance: New Perspectives on His Life and Art after 1940 and Danser Gala: L’Art Bouffe de Salvador Dalí” by Mary Ann Caws, p. 145-146.
“Review of ‘The Art of Lee Miller’: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007” by Peter Barberie, p. 147-151.
“Frida Kahlo in Philadelphia: Life and Death” by Samantha Kavky, p. 152-156.
“Thinking the ‘Post-Indian’: Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World” by Claudia Mesch, p. 157-161.
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. 5 No. 1 (2011) - Table of Contents
“Women in the Surrealist Conversation: Introduction” by Katharine Conley, p. i-xiv.
“Temple of the Word: (Post-) Surrealist Women Artists’ Literary Production in America and Mexico” by Georgiana M.M. Colvile, p. 1-18.
“Leonora Carrngton, Mexico, and the Culture of Death” by Jonathan P. Eburne, p. 19-32.
“The Lost Secret: Frida Kahlo and the Surrealist Imaginary” by Alyce Mahon, p. 33-54.
“Art, Science and Exploration: Rereading the Work of Remedios Varo” by Natalya Frances Lusty, p. 55-76.
“Mary Low’s Feminist Reportage and the Politics of Surrealism” by Emily Robins Sharpe, p. 77-97.
“Waste Management: Hitler’s Bathtub” by Laurie Monahan, p. 98-119.
“Kay Sage’s ‘Your Move’ and/as Autobiography” by Elisabeth F. Sherman, p. 120-133.
“Dorothea Tanning and her Gothic Imagination” by Victoria Carruthers, p. 134-158.
“The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art” by Steven Harris, p. 159-161.
‘Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention’: The Jewish Museum, November 15, 2009 - March 14, 2010” by Lewis Kachur, p. 162-167.
“Review of Gail Levin, ‘Lee Krasner: A Biography’” by Sandra R. Zalman, p. 168-171.
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.