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. 

The first translations of Georges Bataille work available to a Mexican audience were made by writer Salvador Elizondo. After having read Les larmes d’eros (The Tears of Eros) in 1961, he founded S.NOB magazine one year later with the help of a wide group of collaborators that included Surrealist artists like Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna. S.NOB set out to oppose the closed-off nature of Mexican ‘official culture’, at the time dominated by State-promoted cultural nationalism. The magazine was part of a wider crisis of Mexican art and identity triggered in the 1950s and later known as la Ruptura (the Rupture). This new wave was concurrent with the growth of youth and mass popular culture, which found weapons of revolt against cultural nationalism in foreign cinema, music, and other emergent culture industries.

This essay will argue that S.NOB articulates an avant-garde, surrealist discourse that departs from the main current associated with André Breton. Instead, it closely follows the late writings of Georges Bataille via Elizondo’s translations and interpretations of his work. It will overview the theoretical aspects of Elizondo’s reading of Bataille in order to assess images and texts of the magazine, primarily Kati Horna’s photography, Alberto Gironella’s paintings (reproduced in print), and Tomás Segovia and Fernando Arrabal’s writings.

The objective is to show, through a sample analysis of the magazine’s discourse, the Bataillean construction of this particular collective’s avant-garde revolt. In it, the legacy of the surrealist movement in Mexico finds itself at a distance from the recurrent associations of Breton’s proclamations about the country, as well as the polemics derived from the "International Surrealist Exhibition" held in 1940 and the status of the “fantastic” in the history of Mexican art thereafter.

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. 6 No. 1 (2012) - Table of Contents

“Notes for a Historiography of Surrealism in America, or the Reinterpretation of the Repressed” by Samantha Kavky, p. i-ix.

“What Makes a Collection Surrealist?: Twentieth-Century Cabinets of Curiosities in Paris and Houston” by Katharine Conley, p. 1-23.

“Dalí, Magritte, and Surrealism’s Legacy, New York c. 1965” by Sandra Zalman, p. 24-38.

“‘What Makes Indians Laugh’: Surrealism, Ritual, and Return in Steven Yazzie and Joseph Beuys” by Claudia Mesch, p. 39-60. 

“Cracking up an Alligator: Ethnography, Juan Downey’s Videos, and Irony” by Hjorleifur Jonsson, p. 61-86.

“Review of Effie Rentzou, ‘Littérature Malgré Elle: Le Surréalisme et la Transformation du Littéraire’” by Pierre Taminiaux, p. 87-90.

“In Wonderland: the Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States” by Susan L. Aberth, p. 91-94.

“Fantasyland or Wackyland? Animation and Surrealism in 1930s America” by Jorgelina Orfila and Francisco Ortega Grimaldo, p. 1-19.

“El único punto de resistencia: Cultural, Linguistic and Medial Transgressions in the Surrealist Journal VVV” by Andrea Gremels, p. 20-41.

“Chicago Surrealism, Herbert Marcuse, and the Affirmation of the ‘Present and Future Viability of Surrealism’” by Abigail Susik, p. 42-62.

“Surrealist Associations and Mexico’s Precariat in Roberto Wong’s París D.F.” by Kevin M. Anzzolin, p. 63-80.

“Book Review: New Books on Dorothea Tanning” by Katharine Conley, p. 81-83.

“Exhibition Review: ‘Photography and the Surreal Imagination’” by Sandra Zalman, p. 84-89.

“Exhibition Review: ‘Monsters and Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s’” by Jonathan S. Wallis, p. 86-93