The Brooklyn Rail

Assertions of Surrealism’s obsolescence stalked its arrival on American shores in the years following the publication of the “First Manifesto” in Paris, 1924. “The pale young people who drink sherry at little tables and decide the latest vogues in art,” ran one article in Time magazine in 1934, “were all finished with surrealism years ago.”¹ “Of course it is only to be expected,” opined critic Edward Alden Jewell in 1932, “that these European-isms should appear ‘dated’ over here almost from the start.”² Bedevilled by the time-lag accompanying any import, Surrealism, it seemed, was owed only a brief frisson of fashionability, before pale young people pronounced its demise.

In a cultural and critical climate suspicious of its investments in psychoanalysis and Marxism—much less the relationship between the two—Surrealism’s presence was often coterminous with obituary and critique. Deprived of its capacity to shock amidst the horrors of Nazi Germany and the constant advance of consumer culture that mimicked its fascination with bodily fragments and desire, “the only apparent influence of their art so far,” wrote Herbert Muller in 1940, “has been on fashionable advertisements and window displays—on not the class struggle but the classy life.”³ These eulogies continued into, and beyond, the third decade of Parisian Surrealism’s existence, almost as if it might be perennially undead.

During the group’s embattled war-time exile in New York, the queer, gossipy Surrealist publication View, edited by Mississippian polymath Charles Henri Ford, circulated anonymous rumours (tongue firmly in cheek), that the Greek artist Nicolas Calas “is hiding the corpse of surrealism in his room.”⁴ “Surrealism is dead,” wrote Barnett Newman more somberly in 1945.⁵ Again.

And yet, in postwar US culture, the movement retained a vital presence beyond its institutionally narrated legacies in the form of Abstract Expressionism and Pop. The praxis of Surrealism was, instead, to be found outside of major galleries; on picket lines, in homecoming parades and at New Left rallies, among other surprising locations. Such phenomena are only legible as such once critical taxonomies and center-periphery approaches to the movement are set aside, and the capacity for new contexts to invigorate rather than enervate is afforded.

How else to square its alleged demise with the formation of the first organised group of US Surrealists in Chicago, 1966? With Franklin and Penelope Rosemont at the helm, the group mobilized Surrealism in pursuit of the elimination of wage labor, melding the writings of Leonora Carrington with Wobblyism, Bugs Bunny, and the counterculture. Or with the existence of the Glass Veal group in Birmingham, Alabama, whose Marching Vegetable and Marching Appliance Bands amplified Surrealist automatism within their improvised musical performances to possibly unsuspecting high school audiences. For sure, the cultural production of these groups was not collected by MoMA, but cultural masterpieces were not the terms on which they wished to enter, or remake, history.

It is tempting to think of this continuing currency of the movement as a riposte to those many “impatient gravediggers” whom André Breton lambasted in 1942.⁶ And yet, in the US at least, Surrealism’s ongoing existence was not in spite of these gravediggers but, in part, because of them, for it was precisely as something outmoded or abjected that sponsored US artists and activists’ fascination with it.

The ersatz death-knell for Surrealism sounded by Greenbergian formalism at mid-century opened a discursive space in which laying claim to the movement was synonymous with occupying a subject position that stood apart from modernism’s heroics. In this context, Surrealism was coded variously as a minoritarian, queer, non-white, psychedelic or outsider voice that found its corollaries among those who were themselves marginalized by the narratives and practices of national culture.

It was, for instance, via the contents of a rubbish bin in Illinois, 1938, that a ten-year-old African American boy, Ted Joans, first encountered Surrealism. Joans would later become one of Surrealism’s most innovative and charismatic proponents of the twentieth century, yet it was discarded Surrealist periodicals that first alerted him to the potential of the movement to act as “the weapon I chose to defend myself” against racial injustices in the United States.⁷ Even, or perhaps especially, as something outmoded and abjected, Surrealism appealed to Joans and others who were attracted not only by its many formal innovations, but equally attuned to its decades of implacable—though contextually specific—resistance to the social, political, and racial inequalities of modernity, which continued to resonate well beyond Paris in the 1920s.

I do not mean to posit some indivisible, ahistorical essence of Surrealism, just that it continues to provide a living language with which to think and to tackle the yet unfinished projects of decolonisation, antiracism, proletarian revolution, and sexual liberation. Impatient gravediggers, indeed.