An icecrawler, with glycol in its blood or not, still takes a nap now and then.
At the same time as Blogspot statistics showed that The Icecrawler/Heelwalker actually had quite a lot of readers, contributions ran thin. Designed as a collective project, it had then become too dependent on its editor, and when contribitions had since long run short and the editor's capacity was reduced or rerouted, the site had to become dormant. Maybe this is not surprising, considering for example that three of the individuals adding the most input to the general discussion as well as occasional individual texts all currently have their individual blogs. (Does this mean that they are modern enough so that they have an organic relationship with their computer and act through it more directly than they do through discussions and agreements with others, or does it mean that they are traditional enough to simply prefer working with their individual name or nickname as the accumulative heading? Ah, never mind.) (In this particular area, I don't know if it needs to be said that this does not imply that group activity as such is disrupted.) Or does it mean that Icecrawler is an obsolete project that fails to enthuse most of its instigators? Or shall we believe in some natural cyclicity? We'll see. We shall at least not masochistically assume an imperative to frequently update just as a way to argue to ourselves that we exist or to maintain someone's attention at any price. In fact we may even deliberately prefer to keep far away from that logic. A more thorough understanding of what we can do in the illumination from surrealism, and a more thorough understanding of surrealism itself, are not topics that will contest for the attention of the bored general public one week and be outdated the next week. While we must of course recognise the inevitable fact that less frequently updated sites are sites which are less frequently visited looking for updates. Well, this is all in the manner of messages in bottles anyway. A trail of bottles in different colours nightly rocking by our little stretch of coast. The beach forager who finds them is no less random and chosen than the troll who releases them.
The Icecrawler have just been updated with a large number of items. Some are older, and placed further below to simulate the blog's chronological structure, while others are more recent: in assorted topics, including some discussion over items in the recently published vast surrealist anthology What Will Be.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
An exhibition held
We had an exhibition at a commercial gallery (Galleri Lili) in Stockholm throughout the month of April 2014. One of its main focuses was on intermediate forms, and we assembled a relatively large object section in order to investigate various aspects of intermediate objects. The exhibition space was also utilised for a small series of experiments and performances contributing to this investigation.
NYMPH IMAGO- an exhibition about intermediate forms, unknown animals and the crystalised flutter of transformation itself.
As a homage to the revolutionary nature of imagination, the Surrealist Group in Stockholm with friends, issues an invitation to a spring exhibition, a collective attempt to make do with the petrified spirit of the times and conjure forth all the dimensions of reality, to temporary occupy space in order to smuggle down seeds of life between the high-rise buildings.
During three weeks we fill the exhibition space with objects and events which will remain in their moments of transformation: text, image and invisible sea-stars, fossilised nerve signals along the walls and a throng of enigmatic life forms moving in the periphery of the field of vision.
Take a pause from your rusty telephone, drag your body through the payment zones of the city, and help us finding out what it is that moves just behind the set.
Who or what is it that speaks through our mouth, sleeps in our beds, creates in our place? Mythological creatures, socioeconomical contingencies, schizoid partial personaliites, lightnings from the future? What are the prehistorical animals moving between the trembling membranes of the brain?
Through games and speculation you are invited to join forces with the exhibitors and reconstruct, imagine or reveal who was made what and who has made whom, or just to become uncertain about it all at last.
(Coordinators Niklas Nenzén & Lars Rosenström. Original setup of exhibition included John Andersson, Linnea Bergman, Erik Bohman, Christofer Dahlby, Kim Fagerstam, Mattias Forshage, Riyota Kasamatsu, CM Lundberg, Emma Lundenmark, Giuliano Medici, Niklas Nenzén, Lars Rosenström, Hugo Röjgård, Emil Särelind, Ika Österblad. Later participation also by others.)
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| NN |
As a homage to the revolutionary nature of imagination, the Surrealist Group in Stockholm with friends, issues an invitation to a spring exhibition, a collective attempt to make do with the petrified spirit of the times and conjure forth all the dimensions of reality, to temporary occupy space in order to smuggle down seeds of life between the high-rise buildings.
During three weeks we fill the exhibition space with objects and events which will remain in their moments of transformation: text, image and invisible sea-stars, fossilised nerve signals along the walls and a throng of enigmatic life forms moving in the periphery of the field of vision.
Take a pause from your rusty telephone, drag your body through the payment zones of the city, and help us finding out what it is that moves just behind the set.
Who or what is it that speaks through our mouth, sleeps in our beds, creates in our place? Mythological creatures, socioeconomical contingencies, schizoid partial personaliites, lightnings from the future? What are the prehistorical animals moving between the trembling membranes of the brain?
Through games and speculation you are invited to join forces with the exhibitors and reconstruct, imagine or reveal who was made what and who has made whom, or just to become uncertain about it all at last.
The Stockholm surrealist group and friends
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| JA |
Games about objects
These were the active investigations into the transformations during the course of the exhibition Nymph Imago:
1. Disguised as an opening performance, MF and EL carried out the game of questioning chosen objects simply by touching them and allowing them to inspire automatic speech.
2. During a game evening with friends and a few curious, we asked participants to pick an object in the exhibition and imagine what two things it was an intermediate between.
3. Similarly but the other way around, we asked participants to pick two objects in the exhibition and develop an image of the intermediate form between them.
4. Furthermore, a number of improvised enquiries and collective drawings were passed around founded in questions raised by the objects.
5. During the closing event, KE was quickly writing poems inspired by chosen objects and reading them aloud.
1. Disguised as an opening performance, MF and EL carried out the game of questioning chosen objects simply by touching them and allowing them to inspire automatic speech.
2. During a game evening with friends and a few curious, we asked participants to pick an object in the exhibition and imagine what two things it was an intermediate between.
3. Similarly but the other way around, we asked participants to pick two objects in the exhibition and develop an image of the intermediate form between them.
4. Furthermore, a number of improvised enquiries and collective drawings were passed around founded in questions raised by the objects.
5. During the closing event, KE was quickly writing poems inspired by chosen objects and reading them aloud.
A slippery mirror in a rainforest - the framework of the integrity of surrealism
An adventure plunging into a luscious thicket, appearing to some as a spaceship, others an old locomotive, others a party of explorers on foot, yet others an incredible caterpillar with hares' legs kicking in all directions amidst an echinoderm's spines and gently waving tubules, is the vehicle called surrealism. A vehicle for adventure, exploration, drifting, getting lost, and at the same time a hull creating a favoured space which is an inducer of an atmosphere of poetic dynamism and a creativity beyond control, as well as a glittering skeleton serving as attachment points for the defence of spiritual security.
It is a manner of a devil's contract. We tap into a strange power source by pooling our own resources with those already there. A remarkable sense of communion occurs, in which we turn out to have access to the experiences of all the others struggling in similar yet differently shaped causes in a substantially same vein; all those that do it, individually or collectively, in other places in the world at this moment – and, even more remarkably, all those that have done it through history. And in fact not only since the inception of explicit surrealism in the early 20th century, but also in a chain of selective affinities of the pre-surrealist tradition which becomes visible only a posteriori through the conquering of the vantage point of explicit surrealism, a historical reality which becomes real retrospectively, adding the experiences of hundreds of poetic adventurers, radical romanticists, investigative hermeticists, visionaries and revolt movements to our own.
This is the core of the sense in which surrealism is, and needs to be, a movement, and in which the surrealist tradition and the pre-surrealist tradition are crucial for it. The trajectory of organised surrealism becomes a nexus connecting threads of various colours into a monstrous and marvellous body of surrealist experience that goes far beyond the organised movement, in time, place and designation. This is the objective entity that some authors have misunderstood (Jean Schuster and subsequent eclecticists and academics that have benefitted from the interpretation) as an "eternal surrealism", as if it wasn't only the revelation of these surrealist aspects within explicit surrealism that realised them as an integrated objective fact in the first place. And then surrealism keeps changing through the historical choices made by those who contribute to it, making certain turns, retreats from blind alleys and progress into uncharted terrains, reassessments of emphases, new absorptions, in accordance with what the collected experience seems to demand to retain its integrity in new settings and situations.
Thus, the care for the poetic phenomenon, the stubborn trust in the unknown, and therefore a recognition of the inexhaustibility and irreducibility of creativity, of desire, of imagination and of play, as well as the refusal to limit one's quest to rational terms and to ideologically separated forums, the dismissal of conventional solutions, seem to be a constant core throughout ever new guises. Or, as we are mid-journey, any formulation of the core remains preliminary; both because formulae hardly catch the essentials, and because we are still in the process of investigating what parts can be renegotiated still within a solidly surrealist framework.
This is also a kind of real imaginary collectivity, which makes surrealism a collective adventure even for those who pursue their own projects alone. But then it is a matter of fact that any such struggles will usually find it natural to attempt to pool resources with other human beings physically present, in order to ascertain its manifestation in everyday life rather than separate from it, to ascertain a playful dynamic beyond any single person's control, to set aside particular individual fixed thoughts and arbitrary circumscriptions, and at the same time provide intimate criticism as well as creative challenges. Of course, communication technologies today allow us to collaborate remarkably close with physically absent people, but since this is restricted to the hours when we in a sense withdraw from everyday life to tune in with our communication devices, and since it entails meeting specifically as free-floating yet verbal subject positions rather than as whole open-ended animals and physical spirits, it will never make actual encounters obsolete. Groups today can have an active very wide geographical periphery, but they still need a geographical center.
In order to proceed however, this vehicle that we were talking about must also make sure not to get caught in the vines or melt into the background. In order to stay focused on an uncompromised sense of the unknown, in order to stay aware of the limitless claims of desire and creativity, it remains necessary to refuse all faith in given options and good behavior, to refuse to abandon the right to denounce the current order on the whole. We can live as nonconformists and manifest and support any deviations from given normality, from the recommended comfortable ways of organising life, that we may see or invent and recognise as instances of sparks of freedom, even if only in the preliminary form of deeply felt refusal. As surrealists, it seems particularly crucial to not give in to any compromises on behalf of surrealism, facilitating its reduction to merely a thing within art, literature, individual life philosophies, or politics. Whichever pragmatical choices each individual makes in order to survive, surrealism itself will remain a source of connection and inspiration only inasmuch as there is dismissal of petty careers in its name and of pragmatical restrictions of its scope. It requires to be put into practice ridden of utilistic concerns, in the manner of play.
Thus, this adventure remains at heart an international, collective, traditional, historically changing, experimental, non-conformist, useless, playful and moral endeavour. But the notions of collectivity, of nonconformism, of tradition, and even more so of wasteful expenditure – efforts that don't pay in terms of prestige and money, are intensely outdated in these times. (Tradition and morals may be popular in conservative views where they are seen as monolithic and imposed by fate, which is quite the opposite from their application here as radical instances of selective affinities and nonconformism.) All this contributes to our remaining marginalised, as well as remaining a beacon of attraction.
But it is not a modest undertaking. It is not one of those Hollywood devil's contracts where you sell your soul for fame, money and mating opportunities. It is rather of the faustian type where you do it by inner necessity, for the knowledge (in one sense or another), for the massiveness of the desire. And at one point or another there is a particular strait of Scylla and Charybdis to face, navigating between the rather arbitrary but apparently strongly attractive poles that we can most easily describe as revisionism and orthodoxy.
Revisionism, as if an old idea have an inherent programmed senescence, or if the world would indeed have changed enough for the basic aims that surrealism was founded to manifest, investigate, fight for, to have become obsolete in some fundamental sense. Yes, often surrealism have strikingly missed interesting things in the past, or been sticking to prejudices, or trying out strategies that failed. But it is only through the continued application of surrealist vigilance and the continued devotion to the dynamics of the poetic quest that these can be identified and evaluated. The surrealist project needs to be continuously revised for the purpose of its own aims; if those aims themselves are revised or forgotten there is nothing to provide coherence and one can only end up with a superficial eclecticism based on petty personal preferences or shaky pragmatism.
Orthodoxy, as if things wouldn't have changed at all, or if the original project launched was not a living thing picking up experiences and new choices and curiosities along the way. Yes, very often a consistent surrealist rigor is sufficient to assess contemporary phenomena presented in a frenzied queue. But, consistent surrealist rigor itself is dependent on relying on the experiences of the movement as such and of oneself, empiricism, experiment and especially the curiosity and sensibility to be able to detect the truly poetic and emancipatory aims in phenomena where they have not been demonstrated before or where they have not been manifested before.
Revisionist choices very often motivate a lack of rigor and coherence, eagerness to shady deals and major compromises, and ultimately lack of commitment and honesty altogether. While orthodox choices very often motivate an unnecessary self-isolation and paradoxically loudmouthed shyness about entering into dialogue, and a wilful inability to identify dynamic potentiality in the present situation and contemporary expressions. For both cases, it can be argued that the very nature of surrealism as a historical movement embodying a focal point of very long-lasting aims and desires falsifies those self-chosen limitations. The cause of poetry demands rigor and vigilance, demands to stay true to both the ruptures historically made and to finding novel paths in the present, needs to recognise new phenomena as instances in a magic mirror of its own immutable core.
Maybe it is just all about the contagiousness of this particular atmosphere, the inexhaustible transformations projected onto the interface from who knows where, the mutual recognition and the productivity of the encounter between the vastness of the unknown and the integrity of the probe. The forest around it keeps changing and there are no set coordinates to say certainly in which direction we are actually moving, but we keep breaking through layers of illusions, we keep making the company of ever new flocks of never-before-seen birds, who recognise their reflection in the gleaming skin of the vehicle just as much as the vehicle recognises itself in the diabolic fire of these birds' eyes.
(Mattias Forshage, published in What will be 2013)
Open/closed A response to Alain Joubert's "Les Cartes sur table: adresse aux surréalistes", the opening essay in What Will Be
(Merl Fluin's post from Gorgon in Furs in March)
Alain Joubert thinks that Surrealism is at risk of falling into obsolescence. He may or may not be right about that. In this time of global revolt and unprecedented repression, is Surrealism as a movement sufficiently informed, equipped and strategised to be proactive on the ground? Can we, for example, negotiate our ways safely and effectively through the heavily surveilled and “militarised” zone of the electronic public sphere, on which many of us are now almost wholly reliant for communication with each other and the wider world? Do we even understand the new forms of organisation, autonomy and activism that are emerging, much less know whether or how to use them? Is there a danger that we’ll just carry on exhibiting, Lulu-publishing and blogging away in a version of Surrealism-as-usual until the jet stream finally washes us all out to sea?
The bleak little outburst above is mine, though, not Joubert’s. His essay rests on the bold premise that Surrealism today needs to take some radical action to get its house in order. But his premise is presented by fiat, not argument. The only “evidence” he offers to back it up is a remark made by André Breton to Octavio Paz in 1964: “I doubt that the world that is beginning can be defined as either affirmation or negation: we are entering a neutral zone, and the Surrealist revolt will have to express itself in forms that are neither negation nor affirmation. We are beyond condemnation versus approval.” I cede to no one in my admiration of Breton, but if one is making an argument that the whole Surrealist movement needs to change direction, a single quote from the great man does not quite seem enough to carry it off.
From this starting point Joubert leaps somewhat unexpectedly to Karl Popper, citing his distinction between “closed” societies, which are “magical and tribal”, and “open” societies, which are those in which “individuals are faced with personal decisions.” Hitherto, says Joubert, Surrealist groups have operated as closed societies, enclaves from which forays or guerrilla-style raids can occasionally be made into the outside world. But now, he says, Surrealism should embrace the model of the open society, which is more in accordance with Breton’s statement of 1964. He’s not, he says nicely, suggesting that existing groups should be excluded from the movement. But it’s simply more appropriate these days for the International Surrealist Movement (his capitals) to operate as a “diaspora” of free individuals. This way of operating will also strengthen the movement, because it will lead to a pluralism and proliferation of Surrealist discoveries, a whole host of new, complementary and non-identitarian truths.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think any of Joubert’s argument makes a lick of sense, and not just because of my instinctive incredulity that any Surrealist would really suggest abandoning magic in favour of individualism. For starters, the argument is flagrantly self-contradictory. We’re supposed to be moving beyond negation and affirmation, and yet we somehow have to choose between two kinds of “society” presented as binary opposites – to say yes to one and no to the other. Um, pardon?
And if we take at face value these two “societies” (I don’t know enough about Popper to be able to take them any other way), then it strikes me that a Surrealist group encompasses both of them at once: it is simultaneously tribal and individualist; it is simultaneously about magic and freedom; it is, in fact, a perpetually unfolding dialectic between those two things. That’s what gives a Surrealist group its distinctive character, distinguishing it from a collaborative network on the one hand and a brainwashed cult on the other. The peculiar experience of being in a Surrealist group seems to be phenomenologically difficult for those who have never had it to understand; it’s the thing academic surrealismologists most often get most hopelessly wrong. (I encountered another in a long line of examples at Tate Britain’s recent launch event for On The Thirteenth Stroke Of Midnight, when the otherwise very sympathetic and certainly well-intentioned Michel Rémy revealed a startling incomprehension that a Surrealist group might be anything other than just a bunch of Surrealists who live in the same geographical area and collaborate with each other every now and again.) But it’s weird, and even a bit worrying, to encounter that misunderstanding from within the movement.
Tribalism and individualism, magic and personal decision-making, these are not mutually exclusive, and the Surrealist group is the arena par excellence for bringing them all into play: what is closed is also already open. Perhaps we might try thinking about some of these questions not in terms of Popperian open or closed societies, but rather by considering the Surrealist group as an open system in a Prigoginian sense: exchanging energy and information with its environment, seething with disorder and process, subject to feedback loops and non-linear fluctuation patterns that at points of high intensity can erupt, change and transform into new shapes and even whole new systems.
Maybe the aspects of Surrealism’s socio-political environment to which I pointed in my opening paragraph are pushing Surrealist groups towards a Prigoginian “bifurcation point” when the movement will either disintegrate or be utterly transfigured into something new. In that case, Joubert will have been right that Surrealism today is at a watershed. But I see no convincing case so far to abandon group organisation in the face of it. When push comes to shove, I’ll stand with my tribe, individually and magically.
MFl
Alain Joubert thinks that Surrealism is at risk of falling into obsolescence. He may or may not be right about that. In this time of global revolt and unprecedented repression, is Surrealism as a movement sufficiently informed, equipped and strategised to be proactive on the ground? Can we, for example, negotiate our ways safely and effectively through the heavily surveilled and “militarised” zone of the electronic public sphere, on which many of us are now almost wholly reliant for communication with each other and the wider world? Do we even understand the new forms of organisation, autonomy and activism that are emerging, much less know whether or how to use them? Is there a danger that we’ll just carry on exhibiting, Lulu-publishing and blogging away in a version of Surrealism-as-usual until the jet stream finally washes us all out to sea?
The bleak little outburst above is mine, though, not Joubert’s. His essay rests on the bold premise that Surrealism today needs to take some radical action to get its house in order. But his premise is presented by fiat, not argument. The only “evidence” he offers to back it up is a remark made by André Breton to Octavio Paz in 1964: “I doubt that the world that is beginning can be defined as either affirmation or negation: we are entering a neutral zone, and the Surrealist revolt will have to express itself in forms that are neither negation nor affirmation. We are beyond condemnation versus approval.” I cede to no one in my admiration of Breton, but if one is making an argument that the whole Surrealist movement needs to change direction, a single quote from the great man does not quite seem enough to carry it off.
From this starting point Joubert leaps somewhat unexpectedly to Karl Popper, citing his distinction between “closed” societies, which are “magical and tribal”, and “open” societies, which are those in which “individuals are faced with personal decisions.” Hitherto, says Joubert, Surrealist groups have operated as closed societies, enclaves from which forays or guerrilla-style raids can occasionally be made into the outside world. But now, he says, Surrealism should embrace the model of the open society, which is more in accordance with Breton’s statement of 1964. He’s not, he says nicely, suggesting that existing groups should be excluded from the movement. But it’s simply more appropriate these days for the International Surrealist Movement (his capitals) to operate as a “diaspora” of free individuals. This way of operating will also strengthen the movement, because it will lead to a pluralism and proliferation of Surrealist discoveries, a whole host of new, complementary and non-identitarian truths.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think any of Joubert’s argument makes a lick of sense, and not just because of my instinctive incredulity that any Surrealist would really suggest abandoning magic in favour of individualism. For starters, the argument is flagrantly self-contradictory. We’re supposed to be moving beyond negation and affirmation, and yet we somehow have to choose between two kinds of “society” presented as binary opposites – to say yes to one and no to the other. Um, pardon?
And if we take at face value these two “societies” (I don’t know enough about Popper to be able to take them any other way), then it strikes me that a Surrealist group encompasses both of them at once: it is simultaneously tribal and individualist; it is simultaneously about magic and freedom; it is, in fact, a perpetually unfolding dialectic between those two things. That’s what gives a Surrealist group its distinctive character, distinguishing it from a collaborative network on the one hand and a brainwashed cult on the other. The peculiar experience of being in a Surrealist group seems to be phenomenologically difficult for those who have never had it to understand; it’s the thing academic surrealismologists most often get most hopelessly wrong. (I encountered another in a long line of examples at Tate Britain’s recent launch event for On The Thirteenth Stroke Of Midnight, when the otherwise very sympathetic and certainly well-intentioned Michel Rémy revealed a startling incomprehension that a Surrealist group might be anything other than just a bunch of Surrealists who live in the same geographical area and collaborate with each other every now and again.) But it’s weird, and even a bit worrying, to encounter that misunderstanding from within the movement.
Tribalism and individualism, magic and personal decision-making, these are not mutually exclusive, and the Surrealist group is the arena par excellence for bringing them all into play: what is closed is also already open. Perhaps we might try thinking about some of these questions not in terms of Popperian open or closed societies, but rather by considering the Surrealist group as an open system in a Prigoginian sense: exchanging energy and information with its environment, seething with disorder and process, subject to feedback loops and non-linear fluctuation patterns that at points of high intensity can erupt, change and transform into new shapes and even whole new systems.
Maybe the aspects of Surrealism’s socio-political environment to which I pointed in my opening paragraph are pushing Surrealist groups towards a Prigoginian “bifurcation point” when the movement will either disintegrate or be utterly transfigured into something new. In that case, Joubert will have been right that Surrealism today is at a watershed. But I see no convincing case so far to abandon group organisation in the face of it. When push comes to shove, I’ll stand with my tribe, individually and magically.
MFl
Closed/open
I cannot but agree fully with Merl's piece (above and in its original place), though I might take the opportunity to repeat old complaints and address a wider phenomenon that Joubert's view peripherally tangents: the general provincial (or even patriotic) and nostalgic view of surrealism that reduces surrealism to France, French language, the Paris group, from the 20s to the 60s. Of course this is mainly maintained by academics, critics, art collectors, anti-surrealists and all kinds of passive surrealismophiles, who all want to confine surrealism more narrowly in time and space to something managable, surveyable and collectable and who are unable or uninterested in noticing a deeper motivation in surrealism and the continued relevance of that motivation. For them it is just natural. But sometimes sympathetic fellow-travellers and scattered veterans, even active surrealists, express rather alarming and/or foul-smelling opinions and slips of the tongue identifying surrealism with surrealism in France, identifying French language as the true domain for surrealism, identifying the surrealist movement with the Paris group, identifying surrealism since the 60s with mainly a hiatus in activity characterised by the crisis, upbreak and continued crisis of collective activity in France.
Joubert's observations are readable, interesting and worth consideration. There is a point in considering the possibility to rethink organisation issues, there is a point in considering surrealist action rather than surrealist letter, there is a point in emphasising the aspect of active myth, even metaphilosophy (whatever that is) and utopia-criticism, there is a point in reconsidering. When keeping in mind Joubert's lucid account of the 1960s crisis in France we can be sure that he's not unaware as to what is at stake. But it is a pity that he has not really considered the vast experience of the surrealist movement since, outside France and even within France, which is obviously relevant when considering the future of surrealism... I cannot but consider this as part of the same kind of blinds as when Tetrault, Mordant and Saban all campaigned for the necessity for contemporary surrealism of studying the depressed and obscure anthology La Civilisation surréaliste 1976 as if it was the most critical, promising, summarising and contemporary benchmark summary of the surrealist position...
Joubert lists a number of hastily sketched questions, some of which are sharp and relevant, others little more than witty aphorisms; some are mere repetitions in the most innocent form of whether we might dare reconsider some traditional views in surrealism which have in fact often been criticised or even abandoned in modern activities the past 50 years, and whether we should consider contemporary movements and lines of thoughts, and modes and genres of expression not common in old surrealism, which have in fact often been considered and sometimes even made crucial parts of surrealist activity in various countries for the past 50 years...
And most importantly, outside France, the group as a natural unit for surrealist activity has never come anywhere near becoming obsolete (except for internet artists who don't want to meet at all, and perhaps for some Canadians). [Adding afterwards some links to treatments of the topic at this blog: just above, a few years ago and somewhat later.] Within France, the situation might indeed be more complicated and loads of historically amassed contradictions and complications threatingly hang over any urge for surrealist initiatives, but why choose to consider the hardships and doubts of the liaison and scattered groupuscules in the 70s as more significant and more contemporary than the rich experience of the Groupe Parisienne de Mouvement Surréaliste from just before 1990 to now? Again, calls for reconsideration, reflection and path-choosing will be a handy genre for pointing out problems and possible openings, but will be much more useful if not denying or neglecting experiences made up to now...
MFo
Joubert's observations are readable, interesting and worth consideration. There is a point in considering the possibility to rethink organisation issues, there is a point in considering surrealist action rather than surrealist letter, there is a point in emphasising the aspect of active myth, even metaphilosophy (whatever that is) and utopia-criticism, there is a point in reconsidering. When keeping in mind Joubert's lucid account of the 1960s crisis in France we can be sure that he's not unaware as to what is at stake. But it is a pity that he has not really considered the vast experience of the surrealist movement since, outside France and even within France, which is obviously relevant when considering the future of surrealism... I cannot but consider this as part of the same kind of blinds as when Tetrault, Mordant and Saban all campaigned for the necessity for contemporary surrealism of studying the depressed and obscure anthology La Civilisation surréaliste 1976 as if it was the most critical, promising, summarising and contemporary benchmark summary of the surrealist position...
Joubert lists a number of hastily sketched questions, some of which are sharp and relevant, others little more than witty aphorisms; some are mere repetitions in the most innocent form of whether we might dare reconsider some traditional views in surrealism which have in fact often been criticised or even abandoned in modern activities the past 50 years, and whether we should consider contemporary movements and lines of thoughts, and modes and genres of expression not common in old surrealism, which have in fact often been considered and sometimes even made crucial parts of surrealist activity in various countries for the past 50 years...
And most importantly, outside France, the group as a natural unit for surrealist activity has never come anywhere near becoming obsolete (except for internet artists who don't want to meet at all, and perhaps for some Canadians). [Adding afterwards some links to treatments of the topic at this blog: just above, a few years ago and somewhat later.] Within France, the situation might indeed be more complicated and loads of historically amassed contradictions and complications threatingly hang over any urge for surrealist initiatives, but why choose to consider the hardships and doubts of the liaison and scattered groupuscules in the 70s as more significant and more contemporary than the rich experience of the Groupe Parisienne de Mouvement Surréaliste from just before 1990 to now? Again, calls for reconsideration, reflection and path-choosing will be a handy genre for pointing out problems and possible openings, but will be much more useful if not denying or neglecting experiences made up to now...
MFo
Open/closed/closed - political and other implications of organisational heterogenity
Miguel Perez Corrales who (like me) were on the editorial board of What Will Be, has posted a number of blog entries highlighting various part of the contents, which may provide inspirational glimpses to those who do not have the book. Sometimes the angle is surprising, and I had a rather hard time understanding the point of his criticism of either Swedish surrealist veteran Ilmar Laaban, about whom I had written a memorial article, or of me, in one of the posts. As a historical background to the heterogenity of surrealist organisation in the late 40s, where Laaban was involved in several more or less "dissident" forums, I had cited a number of reasons that were historically important for people not to rally uncritically to Breton at that particular time, and I even said that there was a point with a lot of them. Miguel dismisses them with that they mostly smack of stalinism.
Divergences in the 40s
It is an interesting fact that it was indeed the La Main à Plume and other groups in occupied Europe, which had a certain number of, at the time, left-opportunist quasi-stalinist members (several of whom later developed into actual stalinists) - but also many trotskyists and others -, that were the ones who insisted at the time on maintaining the epistemological project within surrealism that is connected with surrealism's hegelianism and which Breton was largely abandoning in his New York exile. The French group during the decades just after the war were indeed more interested in emphasising the esoteric aspect of surrealism's epistemology and the utopian and anarchist aspect of surrealism's politics, but hegelianism and marxism were part of the outlook of many important individuals and subgroups even in France during those times, and had a substantial revival with the revival of surrealist activities themselves in the 60s. Allowing stalinism a monopoly on Marx's thought is something that fashionable liberals and the most simplistic anarchists do. Nevertheless, isn't one of the most crucial things about surrealism's epistemology to see the broad ways in which a traditional, poetic and secret discipline like hermetism/esoterism overlaps with a systematic theory in the philosophical language about change, identity and meaning such as hegelianism (not without precedents: many radical romantics, radical occultists and symbolists did this)? And isn't one of the most crucial things about surrealism's politics that it has affinities with a broad range of emancipatory and revolutionary movements and may join forces with any such specialised agents for periods but cannot be reduced to either? Most of us agree that it was a mistake to join the French stalinist PC in the 30s, but an understandable mistake which had its reasons, and that it was a much more stupid and hardly understandable mistake to do it the 40s (though many surrealists out of respect for the Belgian surrealists or for Jaguer or for Jorn would excuse that too). But this is another question than that of abandoning a systematical theory on society and history (marxism) in favour of some timeless principles (anarchism and utopianism), or abandoning an explicit poetical, epistemological and metaphysical philosophy in 19th century terms (hegelianism) in favour of one obscurely expressed in "timeless" renaissance, medieval and late antiquity terms (hermetism). In both those cases it's not about betting on one horse for the moment, it is more about investigating overlaps and complementing possibilities or of failing to do so. It is also another question than that of either trusting Breton whatever he says and does and wait for him to tell you how the surrealist movement should be organised after the war, or critically considering Breton's position and choosing yourself how to organise. The latter is not less surrealist than the former, and is of course in no way stalinist by implication... We could even note that Breton himself, always an intelligent man regardless of whether one thinks he may be criticised or not, was not sure how to proceed with organisation after the war and famously pondered the question for a couple of years before he relaunched the old surrealist group at the insistance of many of his friends. The plethora of surrealist journals, grouplets and networks in the mid- to late 40s (and also the vast number of adherents rallying to the relaunched group) is indeed one of the most fascinating things about the history of surrealism.
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| Ilmar Laaban arrives at the Bureau of Surrealist Investigations in Stockholm in 1986 |
Then it is a completely different thing that Laaban of course had no sympathy whatsoever for stalinism. Refugees from the Baltic states in the 40s rarely had! It was not the least his activity as a Trotskyist in his youth in Estonia that made it necessary to escape Soviet occupation. While in Sweden he quickly started increasingly leaning towards anarchism during the late 40s. And made it a point, anecdotally, to refuse to stand as a member of the editorial board of imaginist journal Salamander for one issue where one writer insisted on a point which could be considered stalinist in an article about Mayakovsky.
But then, I also fail to see any particular "rationalism" in the positions of Waldberg (nostalgia for interwar surrealism, a dash of bataillian mysticism, and a good dose of bourgeois art-world-professional pragmatism) or Caillois (uncompromising insistence on the rigor of the quasiscientific aspect of surrealist experimentation, avoiding any pragmatism, and later turning towards a certain aloof poetic mysticism). As far as I know the "humanism" of Matta was an invective thrown at him a posteriori and bore no relationship to the ideological sense of humanism that surrealism would necessarily oppose (Or maybe he himself was responsible of some ambiguous comments about returning the focus to man when recognisable figures re-entered his paintings? Still far from ideological humanism though)...
"Humanist" paintings by Matta...
Bretonism
Well, of course, we surrealists are used to seeing raging anti-surrealists using factually motivated criticism of Breton as a pretext for presenting surrealism on the whole as completely illegitimate. But does that really mean that anyone who says that Breton can be criticised, speaks in unison with the stalinists and is allied with fashionable antisurrealist academics? No, I don't think so. Personally, I find it important that a surrealist today is struggling with the accumulated experience and ideas of surrealism and of the brilliant pathfinder Breton. His ideas have a bearing on our daily behavior only inasmuch as we are able to scrutinise what is their liberating core sense and what is historical contingency and temporary tactics including misguided tactics and directions. If Breton is made infallible, then he becomes a "great spirit" in the pantheon of minds, which we can feel inspired by at will, but whose experiences are less crucial to our own, whose organisational concerns need not be ours, whose ideas and actions is something more distant from us, which we are left to leave without concern in our daily life. That is reverence and canon; it is not the sense of being a movement.
Mattias Forshage
Egg timers scattered throughout the vegetation
Decades are seaweed dangling from our hands as we gesture. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. There is something in the middle of the pond. Emergence is imminent. Counting would have to know what entities are the ones that count.
This March, the surrealist group in Leeds, still considered a young group, celebrated the 20th anniversary of the "New Man" game which constituted the group in a profound sense (the group was in fact launched already the preceding year).
At the same time, the surrealist group in Prague celebrated their 80th birthday (it can be argued that surrealist activity in Prague has been continuous ever since 1934, but it has hardly been uninterrupted, going through a large number of reorganisations and clandestine phases).
The years themselves are hardly significant, but the experience they signify is, and the celebration itself may be, and the conjunction of celebrations would perhaps seem to. If we are looking for emergences, and synchronisation mechanisms, that is. Or just vast piles of seaweed, new man or not.
This March, the surrealist group in Leeds, still considered a young group, celebrated the 20th anniversary of the "New Man" game which constituted the group in a profound sense (the group was in fact launched already the preceding year).
At the same time, the surrealist group in Prague celebrated their 80th birthday (it can be argued that surrealist activity in Prague has been continuous ever since 1934, but it has hardly been uninterrupted, going through a large number of reorganisations and clandestine phases).
The years themselves are hardly significant, but the experience they signify is, and the celebration itself may be, and the conjunction of celebrations would perhaps seem to. If we are looking for emergences, and synchronisation mechanisms, that is. Or just vast piles of seaweed, new man or not.
New York, editorial note
Those interested will probably have discovered it by now, but during the last year one of the more prominent resources of information on historical as well as contemporary surrealism online has been Paul McRandle's Surrealist NYC blog. Starting out as a documentation of surrealist activities in New York in the 1940s, it soon broadened into contemporary international surrealist notes, and more importantly, to occasional posts from the editor's own walks, discoveries and reflections through New York (I'm waiting eagerly for more of that kind). That step was absolutely necessary, moving from giving the impression that "Surrealist New York City" is identical with the New York experienced by European refugees in the 40s, to the pertinent questions of what "Surrealist New York City" is on the whole; what aspects of the life and phenomenology of that exceptional city that could be identified as the surrealist city, the ghost structure connecting different neighborhoods, different historical anecdotes, different future anecdotes now perceived merely as distinct impressions of possibilities, according to the psychogeography of poetry rather than of discipline, habit, business, commerce, or tourism...
The way European surrealists experienced New York in the 40s may provide interesting clues to this city of course, but native surrealists just as much, and certain other currents moving in the environment for the purpose of a nonconformist and poetic sense of experimentation, community and exploration without very strong ties to surrealism historically.
Surrealist New York City is a city which is distinctly there but which remains to be uncovered. All good luck in this task and others to Paul McRandle and other New York surrealist comrades!
The way European surrealists experienced New York in the 40s may provide interesting clues to this city of course, but native surrealists just as much, and certain other currents moving in the environment for the purpose of a nonconformist and poetic sense of experimentation, community and exploration without very strong ties to surrealism historically.
Surrealist New York City is a city which is distinctly there but which remains to be uncovered. All good luck in this task and others to Paul McRandle and other New York surrealist comrades!
New York excursus 2
Dream 2:
When I finally come to New York it is not at all like I have imagined it. It is just like Stockholm but somewhat bigger and with more limited options in terms of small shops.
I am desperately looking for a Monica Zetterlund record (Swedish jazz singer), and when I finally get to the jazz section it turns out it is sorted according to composers and not performers, so maybe I could find some of her Bill Evans recordings but not anything by internationally obscure Swedish composers. Instead I look at dvds and find that there are plenty of more or less new science fiction films about alien fleets arriving in New York with allegedly diplomatic missions and ambiguous implications. All these small planes accompanying the big spaceships among the clouds over New York. That is more like a real imaginary New York.
But I am hungry and have little money, I have indeed bought a hotdog but I didn't get any bread with it. Eventually I find a free table, just abandoned by some family who have not eaten much of their servings, so there are plenty of sausages and fries and things around, and I am thinking whether I should eat it all or not. I pour out a substantial slab of Dijon mustard on the table (I seem to be carrying Dijon with me at all times) and realise that there is still no bread.
But I am leaving town soon, for a week-long trip a bit to the south, some localities in New Jersey I need to visit and then Philadelphia. I will have to be back in a week because I remember I have been booked for a poetry reading at an obscure New York venue at that time. And when I am packing my stuff, I suddenly remember Paul M (of surrealist nyc). I need to see him when I am in New York! Why had I forgotten? And there is no time to contact him now. Might he possibly be informed enough about what's going on on the New York poetry scene that he will see my name even though the venue is obscure and might just turn up?
Postscript:Then when I actually went to a Swedish second-hand recordshop and bought me a Zetterlund cd, it had a version of Take Five with Swedish lyrics, as "I New York"(In New York). I wouldn't really call this a coincidence, I probably listened to it as a kid and had just forgotten all about it... But then, what is a coincidence concerning New York at all? A city that has marketed itself as the cultural and economical world capital for many decades will show up everywhere. It is more a matter of seeing the layers of the city, and look for only the particular new york which is the "surrealist NYC".
Dream 3:
And this morning, I was back in New York, but couldn't find my way to a hotel. I was taking leave of my parents who were in one hotel, but as I was finishing their dishes and wanted to throw away all the tomatoes and badger hairs (from brushes) that were piled up in the sink, they said that it's only certified newyorkers who get access to a compost, just like in the case of phonebooks and libraries, only for certified newyorkers. I thought I might not need phonebooks and libraries to get around, as one of my surrealist "superpowers" were that I often find books and maps in the street, extract the information I need and then leave it for someone else to discover (utilising the particular method called "the floating library" by our friends the Kalvarium group in Malmö). But even if I do find some books in the New York street here, I still have no idea where I am, and I get completely lost when trying to move in a circle and get back to my parents' hotel. In fact I end up in what looks like an old hospital garden and the path ends blindly at a stone wall. I look over it, on the other side there is one pair of turkey vultures and one couple of humans making out, with a metro bridge and far away the sea as a backdrop.
M Forshage
When I finally come to New York it is not at all like I have imagined it. It is just like Stockholm but somewhat bigger and with more limited options in terms of small shops.
I am desperately looking for a Monica Zetterlund record (Swedish jazz singer), and when I finally get to the jazz section it turns out it is sorted according to composers and not performers, so maybe I could find some of her Bill Evans recordings but not anything by internationally obscure Swedish composers. Instead I look at dvds and find that there are plenty of more or less new science fiction films about alien fleets arriving in New York with allegedly diplomatic missions and ambiguous implications. All these small planes accompanying the big spaceships among the clouds over New York. That is more like a real imaginary New York.
But I am hungry and have little money, I have indeed bought a hotdog but I didn't get any bread with it. Eventually I find a free table, just abandoned by some family who have not eaten much of their servings, so there are plenty of sausages and fries and things around, and I am thinking whether I should eat it all or not. I pour out a substantial slab of Dijon mustard on the table (I seem to be carrying Dijon with me at all times) and realise that there is still no bread.
But I am leaving town soon, for a week-long trip a bit to the south, some localities in New Jersey I need to visit and then Philadelphia. I will have to be back in a week because I remember I have been booked for a poetry reading at an obscure New York venue at that time. And when I am packing my stuff, I suddenly remember Paul M (of surrealist nyc). I need to see him when I am in New York! Why had I forgotten? And there is no time to contact him now. Might he possibly be informed enough about what's going on on the New York poetry scene that he will see my name even though the venue is obscure and might just turn up?
Postscript:Then when I actually went to a Swedish second-hand recordshop and bought me a Zetterlund cd, it had a version of Take Five with Swedish lyrics, as "I New York"(In New York). I wouldn't really call this a coincidence, I probably listened to it as a kid and had just forgotten all about it... But then, what is a coincidence concerning New York at all? A city that has marketed itself as the cultural and economical world capital for many decades will show up everywhere. It is more a matter of seeing the layers of the city, and look for only the particular new york which is the "surrealist NYC".
Dream 3:
And this morning, I was back in New York, but couldn't find my way to a hotel. I was taking leave of my parents who were in one hotel, but as I was finishing their dishes and wanted to throw away all the tomatoes and badger hairs (from brushes) that were piled up in the sink, they said that it's only certified newyorkers who get access to a compost, just like in the case of phonebooks and libraries, only for certified newyorkers. I thought I might not need phonebooks and libraries to get around, as one of my surrealist "superpowers" were that I often find books and maps in the street, extract the information I need and then leave it for someone else to discover (utilising the particular method called "the floating library" by our friends the Kalvarium group in Malmö). But even if I do find some books in the New York street here, I still have no idea where I am, and I get completely lost when trying to move in a circle and get back to my parents' hotel. In fact I end up in what looks like an old hospital garden and the path ends blindly at a stone wall. I look over it, on the other side there is one pair of turkey vultures and one couple of humans making out, with a metro bridge and far away the sea as a backdrop.
M Forshage
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