Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA)

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, Cinema Issue (2016)

Robert Desnos’s and Man Ray’s 1928 film L'Etoile de mer has long been considered an exemplar of the surrealist love story, thematically similar to Salvador Dalí’s and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (1929) but less overtly shocking. In comparison to the elaborate iconographical analyses of Chien, critiques of L'Etoile tend to describe its avant-garde cinematic style, to distinguish how it illustrates or deviates from Desnos’s scenario, or to provide summary analysis of some of its more obviously Freudian iconography. There have been fewer scholarly explorations of specific symbolism, yet the film exhibits many political-philosophical intertexts, one of which explicitly builds a bridge between the surrealist revolution and America’s core self-signifier, Liberty.

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, Cinema Issue (2016)

La Ciudad Frente al Río (The City in Front of the River) is an Argentinian, ten-minute long film directed by Italian Surrealist Enrico Gras in 1949. The film was part of the promotional material for Bajo Belgrano, a modern housing plan sponsored by the Buenos Aires City Hall under the auspice of populist president Juan Perón. As part of this promotion, German photographer Grete Stern designed a brochure with images from the film and text by the Study for the Plan of Buenos Aires (Estudio del Plan de Buenos Aires, hereafter EPBA). I compare the film and brochure to contemporaneous work by Stern: a series of photomontages illustrating a women’s advice column. The column mined its readers’ dreams for insights into their unconscious, and advised them on proper behavior. Following a similar method, the film found Buenos Aires’ unconscious in the chaos of city life, and revealed what I have termed as "pastoral modernity" as the cure. Masked behind a veneer of revolutionary modernity, the message of these works was that of a nostalgic return to the past—an invitation to sleep, and to dream. Complicating this message, subtle hints in both the film and the photomontages point to the artists’ awareness of the totalizing vision they were collaborating with.

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.

This article discusses the 1940 "International Surrealist Exhibition," a paradigmatic event in the history of Surrealism's transition between Old and New Worlds. Breton’s brainchild, the show claimed a large part of Mexico's national art canon as part of the transnational Surrealist cause. Proving controversial in a heavily nationalist art scene, the show continues to occupy a conflicted position in the historiography of Mexican art. Many describe it as the pivotal event that drove art in Mexico away from nationalism, while others trivialize its impact. In the 1969 book El Surrealismo y el Arte Fantástico de México, the most ambitious response to the 1940 show ever produced, art historian Ida Rodríguez-Prampolini takes the latter position. Much of what Breton and his circle viewed as surrealist in Mexican art, Rodríguez argues, was instead part of the country’s own “fantastic” tradition, in place long before Surrealism arrived. A chauvinist treatise on Mexican identity at first glance, this essay argues that the book instead is emblematic of a long history of anxious relationships between definitions of national identity and the practice of art history in post-revolutionary Mexico.

This essay explores Guatemalan-born painter Carlos Merida's involvement in the surrealist movement. It examines both Merida's contribution to the surrealist understanding of Mexico in the 1940s as well as his adoption and promotion of surrealist ideas as part of his attempt to create a uniquely American avant-garde. These two sides of Merida's engagement with surrealism are studied through the lens of the artist's work as the director of the Galeria de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in the late 1920s and early 1930s, where he showed the work of painters sympathetic to surrealism, his own surrealist-inspired paintings, and his contributions to Wolfgang Paalen's journal "Dyn," published in Mexico City from 1942-1944.

Lautréamont became the preeminent forebear of Surrealism through his inclusion in the movement’s first political agenda, the Orient. His overseas origin predisposed the Surrealists to re-read his works from the perspective of their own anti-occidental thinking. This was possible only through the near-complete absence of biographical data that would have contradicted the figure they desired to see. This made the imagined Lautréamont extremely malleable, easily aligned with other desires after the short agenda of the Orient ceased.

The Surrealists appropriated Lautréamont with increasing vehemence, fashioning him into a quasi-demigod, the utopian Surrealist fighting in their ranks. Again, no biographical data could contradict such a claim. Initially, the Surrealists united to fend off any outside claims on their idol, thus tightening the coherence of the tentatively emerging group. Then, when the movement had stabilized after opting for an affiliation with the political arms of dialectic materialism, Lautréamont was also used against members who had become undesirable. Renegades were denied any right to the model Surrealist and separated from the ideal of surreality that Lautréamont represented.

In addition to the obsessive imagination at work in the making of their Lautréamont, it is worth noting three internal contradictions in the Surrealists’ practice in relation to their idol. First, there is the problematic racially-motivated drive to appropriate Lautréamont because of his place of origin, even if its purpose is to attack a whole system of racial imperialism. Second, the classification of acceptable and unacceptable historic authors that led to the cult of a single genius closely resembles the bourgeois cultural practice to which the Surrealists opposed their narrowing anti-canon of predecessors. Third, the irrational and apodictic seriousness compressed in the symbolic act with which group exclusions were delivered in the name of Lautréamont have elements of those merciless displays of power one would find in medieval ecclesiastic practice or in 20th century totalitarian justice, both designated archenemies of Surrealism.

The appropriation of Lautréamont by the Surrealists in the mid-1920s remains an interesting early case study of entangled history. Particularly in the first half of the 20th century, critics in both France and Uruguay tended to claim Lautréamont as a national hero, sometimes forcefully against the other nation. Those claims proved easy to advance since fundamental biographical data was missing up until the 1970s. The Surrealists’ appropriation arose from the same lack of data and desirous projections, but developed in the opposite direction than most of their compatriots. They did not claim Lautréamont for France, but against France, and his South American origin were not read as a sign of his belonging to Uruguay, but paved the way for his entry into Surrealism.

The creative works of artist and poet Juan Batlle Planas (1911-1966)—a figure relatively unknown outside of Argentina—have long been understood as enigmatic and solitary experiments in surrealism. This essay, through a combination of formal analysis and cultural history, examines his collage series and paintings made in the 1930s and 1940s—especially his Paranoid X-ray series—to argue that these works are representative of a broader set of urban cultural responses in Argentina to the struggles of economic recession, political uncertainty brought by military rule of the 1930s, and tidal waves of (mis)information spread by mass mediated news sources. In particular, my analysis expands on Beatriz Sarlo’s theory of the “knowledge of the poor,” a term she uses to indicate the prominence of professional science, pop psychology, and crackpot inventions in Buenos Aires’s working class and middle class cultures of the 1920s and 1930s. By placing Batlle Planas’ work in this historical context, this essay reveals how Batlle Planas’ eclectic interests in Freudian psychology, Tibetan Buddhism, crystallized minerals, and the bizarre healing theories of Wilhelm Reich correlate with the growing technological imagination inspired by Argentina’s mass media, which in the early decades of the 20th Century circulated a surrealistic jumble of cultural information across Latin America.