The Brooklyn Rail

When I received Ara Merjian’s invitation to reflect on the centenary of the Manifesto of Surrealism, I was a few days shy of hip replacement surgery, a routine but physically demanding procedure. Even before receiving the invitation I’d had Hans Bellmer’s unsettling recourse to the ball joint on the brain. How, I wondered, does a surgeon disarticulate a hip-socket, saw off the ball, and anchor a new one in its place? In his 1938 “Notes on the Subject of the Ball Joint,” the German artist spins out an elaborate theory of how the artificial ball joint enables both articulation and freedom of movement. At once bound and labile, the mechanical joint can link wildly disparate objects but, he claims, it can also link disparate realities, inviting monstrous combinations.

Beneath the surgical drapes, which does an operating table resemble more: a battlefield or a butcher shop? With a shudder I arrived instead at Bellmer’s dolls. These violently anthropomorphic metal-and-plaster hybrids consist of body parts rearranged like anagrams. One such doll consists of the life-sized legs and pelvis of a prepubescent girl, conjoined at the abdomen (a ball joint) with a second pelvis and a second set of legs. It’s a shattering image: an objectification of the human form as redoubled pairs of limbs. She, the doll, is all legs—and no face. The very articulation of the doll presupposes rending, dislocation. The English novelist Angela Carter once described the real-life version of such rending as “physical graffiti”; I hear, too, the sickening pop of joints forced out of their sockets.

Unsurprisingly, Bellmer’s dolls, which began appearing in 1934, have long functioned as a kind of Maginot Line for people’s impressions about Surrealism. With their twisted fantasies of body horror and pedophilia, the dolls articulate the gravest excesses of the Surrealist movement’s poetics of collage—which, after all, is an art of cutting and tearing as much as pasting. It’s one thing to consider Surrealist poetics as a kind of linguistic collage: the bringing together of disparate realities. It’s another thing to consider what happens when those disparate realities approach the status of real flesh—whether by representing fetishistically sexualized bodies or by impinging on embodied experience itself.

My intention here is to invoke, though not to rehearse, the many judgments Bellmer’s dolls have elicited since their creation, and which the Surrealist movement continues to elicit in turn. Many people find the dolls to be categorically unredeemable: under the aegis of experimentalism, they both solicit and reproduce the very horrors they conjure. Some people contend, by contrast, that the dolls’ manifest artificiality has the effect of troubling the power dynamics of subject and object, even going so far as to trouble the very borders of the human. To do so, the logic goes, is to point to the exceptional violence humans are capable of when disavowing the humanity of their victims (as in the case of Jews under Nazism; or victims of sexual violence; or the inhabitants of occupied Gaza, nearly half of whom, unlike Bellmer’s dolls, are actual children). How much of this dehumanizing, objectifying violence resides in oneself—how far do cycles of abuse persist? The artwork cannot break such ingrained patterns on its own; it’s up to you.

These are but two sets of responses to Bellmer’s work; there are others. My point is that such judgments, whether nonacceptance or self-interrogation, are far from mutually exclusive. It’s possible to hold multiple judgments at once.

The same goes for Surrealism writ large. Even in its rhetoric of revolution, liberation, and desire, Surrealism can amount to an unflagging rehearsal of the proclivities of a small circle of white, Parisian men a century ago. Yet so too can Surrealism designate a far broader constellation of intellectuals who engage directly (and indirectly) with the movement’s aspirations, yet who bear altogether different subject-positions, different configurations of desire, horror, and intention. There is a story of Surrealism in which, for instance, the French author-photographer Claude Cahun figures as little more than a side note, whose nonbinary queerness was as marginal to the Parisian group as to many histories of Surrealism. As scholar Jordan Reznick asserts, the gender transgression Cahun practiced is neither deducible from nor reducible to the kinds of gender play represented by, say, Marcel Duchamp’s cross-dressing alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy. Cahun’s work is grounded in discourses and lived experiences of gender nonconformism that were altogether discontinuous with those of a cisgender artist such as Duchamp. Thus there are other stories of Surrealism in which Cahun not only figures prominently, but also disrupts and recombines what can be thought of as Surrealism: the discourses, lived experiences, and forms of embodiment proper to it.

These are only some of the most common poles of contention in the ways people have responded to Surrealism over the past century. None of these judgments represents an all-or-nothing proposition: they all exist, and they are all true. They are conjoined, as it were, at the hip.

Surrealism, I propose, is a discourse of binding and motility: a jointedness that is also disjointed, out-of-joint. This means, on the one hand, that works of Surrealist art (poems, assemblages, paintings) are always bound up in discourses, experiences, and forms of embodiment from which they are all but unextractable. Art created in dialogue with Surrealism over the past century did not spring fully armed from the unconscious mind. It came about through grappling with ideas about political transformation, sexuality, and language, and the very contours of Surrealism itself. These are not simple stories; they are vexed, fascinating, and rife with intensity.

On the other hand, Surrealism makes claims on our own relations of boundedness and detachment. I cannot speak for you, but I can speak for myself: I encounter a work of Surrealist art through the prism of my judgment. Does this mean that I’m merely a spectator, or do I instead become a participant in its machinations? Both positions are complicit in and perhaps even necessary to the “completion” of a work of art, as Duchamp once claimed: such are the criteria for an artwork to carry forth its ballast of meaning. But complicity alone doesn’t fully account for Surrealism’s prosthetic insistence: the work demands attachment, grafting itself to the very fabric of my imagination. Do I want this? Surrealist artworks present themselves—along with the aspirations and violences they bear—as objects that might complete me. This doesn’t happen on its own; it requires my participation. For this reason I find solidarity in the very strongest reactions Surrealism has elicited over the past century, including fury, indignant rejection, or reinvention. Such reactions disclose the jointedness that has taken place; and the result, in whatever affective form, however shattering, is the stirring of emancipatory thought.

I will say nothing of indifference.