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.
This article adds to previous interpretations of Luis Buñuel’s ambiguous attitude towards Christianity by means of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of profanation as developed in his theory of carnivalism. Earlier approaches to Buñuel have either paid too little attention to the question of how his Mexican films, the largest share of his work, were influenced by the cultural context of their production, or they have explicitly denied such an influence. In contrast, this essay tries to demonstrate, on the basis of Nazarín (1959) and Simón del desierto (1965), that Buñuel’s textual strategies of profanation were informed by his experiences as an emigrant in the United States and Mexico, and by ideas concerning the Mexican amalgamation of Spanish Catholicism and indigenous religious beliefs. The title characters of both films, a Catholic priest and an ancient stylite, have chosen lifestyles that are meant to bring them closer to God, but alienate them from their fellow men and their own physical existence. Yet, both movies restore their protagonists’ ordinary humanness and connection to material reality with the help of various carnivalesque profanations that find expression in spatial movements within the vertical as well as the horizontal dimension. The horizontal movements comprise the micro- and the macro-geographical level and link the old world with the new world, which includes both the Mexican countryside and New York City. The essay uses these observations to compare Buñuel with other European Surrealists in Mexican exile, who shared his ambivalence towards religion, but sometimes lacked the high degree of critical differentiation with which he looked at Mexican culture.
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 4 No. 1 (2010) - Table of Contents
“Out of Field (Fuera de campo): Marcel Duchamp in Buenos Aires” by Graciela Speranza, p. 1-14.
“Légitime défense: From Communism and Surrealism to Caribbean Self-Definition” by Lori Cole, p. 15-30.
“Remedios Varo's Mexican Drawings” by Rosa Berland, p. 30-42.
“Bee Dreaming: the Surreal Odysseys Behind Alan Glass’ Wunderkabinetts” by Gloria Orenstein, p. 43-59.
“Review of Patricia Allmer, ‘René Magritte: Beyond Painting’ by Terri Geis, p. 60-63.
“Review of Eric Ratcliffe, ‘Ithell Colquhoun: Pioneer Surrealist, Artist, Occultist, Writer and Poet’” by Elisabeth Sherman, p. 64-68.
“‘Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective’: Issues of Identity and Camouflage” by Samantha Kavky, p. 69-72.
“Review of Catherine Millet, ‘Dalí and Me’” by Jonathan S. Wallis, p. 73-77.
“Maria Martins: the Open Secret of Étant donnés. Review of ‘Marcel Duchamp. Étant donnés’” by Frédérique Joseph-Lowery, p. 78-85.
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 work of the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins (1894-1973) was for several decades completely marginalized in accounts of Surrealism, despite her prominent role in the movement during the 1940s, when her sculpture was included in several Surrealist exhibitions and publications. Maria’s sculpture was rooted in the debates and themes of Brazilian modernism before World War II and the emphasis in her work on Afro-Brazilian culture, as well as the myths and folklore of the Amazon Rainforest, needs to be placed within the context of a larger movement in Brazilian modernism, in which artists, writers, and musicians explored the theory of cultural cannibalism put forth by Oswald de Andrade in his “Manifesto Antropófago” (Cannibalist Manifesto).
Eight Martinican students living in Paris announce their struggle for literary and political agency in the 1932 declaration Légitime defense. Explicitly indebted to Communism and Surrealism, the declaration appropriates these movements’ rhetoric and redirects it to their own condition. Although Communism and Surrealism’s revolutionary zeal and opposition to the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris position them as apt models for the students, their platforms both work to reinscribe the non-Western within a primitivist binary. Through their use of the manifesto, the Martinican students enter into an aesthetic and political debate from a position of authority, both poaching their predecessors’ authority and initiating their own historical trajectory. By defining the Martinican subject within the legacy of Marx and Breton, the eight signatories situate themselves at the intersection of political and artistic revolutionary politics that both reinscribe and resist European distinctions between center and periphery, civilized and primitive, self and other.
The Spanish painter Remedios Varo spent the years of 1941-1963 in exile in Mexico. It is here that she produced her most inventive work, a fusing of various European and indigenous influences and motifs, generating a new form of Surrealism that would come to be regarded as a seminal contribution to Latin American modernist practice and particularly important to the development of Mexican Surrealism.
