Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA)

The critical fate of surrealist visual art in America fluctuates based on the value ascribed to it by critics of contemporary art. Specifically, its mid-century dismissal by Clement Greenberg as retrograde, academic kitsch, condemned it to several decades of irrelevancy; and, in a direct challenge to Greenberg, the critics and scholars of the 1980s and 90s, in particular October group members Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, rehabilitated Surrealism and returned it to contemporary relevance.

This critical fall and rise provokes some interesting questions. Did the modernist rejection and post-modernist resurrection of Surrealism emerge from the inherent postmodernism of the movement itself, or from the agendas of the respective critics? For example, by privileging Georges Bataille and the dissonant Surrealists over André Breton, and a Lacanian theoretical framework over a Freudian one, did Krauss reveal the repressed within Surrealism, or did she reconfigure it in light of contemporary interest in transgression, abjection and the de-centered subject? Can this vision of Surrealism be reconciled with Breton’s romantic idealism and belief in an absolute?

While previous issues of JSA have explored the intersections of Surrealism and ethnography, photography, Latin America and women, this issue assembles various essays that look at the reception of Surrealism in the U.S. and its continued presence in criticism, art, collecting and anthropology.

Breton’s surrealist collection constitutes a twentieth-century cabinet of curiosity that like its baroque predecessors, sought to encompass the world within a contained and concentrated space. This essay argues what makes it a surrealist collection, lies in its ghostliness, its cultivation of a global aesthetic informed by a curiosity about psychological depth. This surrealist collecting sensibility persists in New World collections like the Menil Collection in Houston, which is similarly characterized by ghostliness. Surrealist collections have the potential to help contemporary museum viewers understand better the history of the current aesthetic produced by globalization.

This paper compares two simultaneous exhibitions of Surrealist painters that took place in the Winter of 1965 in New York, arguing that these exhibitions helped to re-write the legacy of Surrealism in the context of contemporary art of the 1960s. Through a consideration of the reception of Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali, this paper illustrates how the vastly different institutional models of the Museum of Modern Art and the Gallery of Modern Art reframed figurative Surrealism for both contemporary audiences as well as the history of modern art.

This paper traces the shift into performative interactions by European scholars and artists as they sought or feigned interaction with the spirits and objects of Native American culture. I discuss the postwar artworks of Max Ernst, Joseph Beuys, and Steven Yazzie. I argue that each of these artists’ use of Native American objects goes beyond earlier surrealist appropriative and mimetic strategies. From a postcolonial position, these artworks address personal trauma as well as the collective trauma of colonialism. Aby Warburg’s late nineteenth-century travel to the American Southwest, and his resulting notion of an aesthetics of empathy, or of “mimesis through communion with/entering into the object,” becomes very relevant for Beuys’ work in particular. Furthermore these postwar artworks by Ernst, Beuys and Yazzie contain a comic element that invites laughter, a critical/therapeutic element that Pierre Clastres describes as a distinctly political act.