Anti-art and plain poor art

IF ART usually makes me suspicious, I still find "anti-art" usually far more stillborn, and usually an even narrower ideology than art. Anti-art is commonly a false denominator, used by people who want to snatch whatever art holds of legitimity, privileges and alms for their own part rather than really question or actually dethrone it.

Often the aim is to reduce art to something completely different (either political activism or philosophy). Otherwise, or simultaneously, it may be about self-marketing in two steps: first one ultraliberal nivellation: art is dead, and no art can claim to better than any other; and then the logical fallacy of self-assertion: if there is no rigid scale of values, no absolute hierarchy, then that means automatically that my own works are just as good as those of all the established artists, regardless of how they actually look. (The argumentation can be recognised from that of the creationists: when the scientists themselves admit that they don't know for certain exactly how evolutionary history took place, then every other theory is exactly as good, for example our theory about divine creation, regardless of whether it completely lacks support.)

"Poetry must be made by all" has been reinterpreted into "poetry is only what everybody already do" or "poetry is done by all, so this means that whatever I do is really good". Under the flourishing of anti-art in the 60s, it became quite obvious that its underlying shared common formula actually was "all we ask is to be recognised as art". This formula is clearly alive today as well, especially in the more or less postmodern-inspired pseudo-vanguardism that makes up the tiresome standard level even in most underground forums today (and which, of course, many single practicioners active in such forums dramatically rise above simply by cultivating a poetic vision or even just a genuinely playful praxis of one or the other kind). It stands perfectly clear that many modern forms av Art with a capital A stand very close to anti-art to the point of being exchangable.

Anti-art in all its varieties (and we've seen a plethora, not just among situationists, anarchists, neodadaists and postmodernists) has its favourite genres:

1. Spontanism, unconcentrated on principle (excessive daub, graffiti-naïvism, absentminded beat poetry, etc)

2. Dashing performance art ("payed play-leader spontanism", "pee-and-poo-humour" etc)

3. Performance art boring as hell ("realistic" minimalism)

4. Conceptual art boring as hell (small gestures illustrating a usually staggering philosophical argument or a thoughtless actualisation of some topic theme)

5. Documentary realism, soul-less on principle (reality tv-shows, selfbiographical comics, underwear- and trashcan-conceptual art)

6. Simple propaganda and simple political campaigning

7. Other simple utilistic communications: classified ads and pick-up lines, humour, porn, vandalism, etc.

Parts of this philosophy, and even more, parts of this political activism, may have its points, but in that case as philosophy or politics respectively, and hardly as art. And parts of spontanist art, in its chaotic expressionism or raw naivism, may have a great poetic and artistic value, which is hardly reinforced by its polemically noisy and nivellating frame.

* * *

Situationists and their followers never grow tired of repeating Debord's 1950s formula "The dadaists negated art without realising it, the surrealists realised art without negating it, it is up to us situationists to simultaneously negate and realise it (NB paraphrase). Apart from the immediately suspect in the combination of progress-faith and grandiose self-image it expresses (that specific combination which is the very foundation of vanguardism), it is hardly a correct image historically.

The activity of the dadaists was hardly aimed at negating art, and reducing their activity to that can be done only on the basis of anti-empirical french-hegelian methodical speculation. What the dadaists did themselves was to manifest how bourgeois society had lost its legitimity, and especially how its alleged crown jewel, culture, so obviously stood without any support for all its claims to being dignified, all-human, cultivated, peaceful, rational and good. So yes, the dadaists launched a nivellation, but not an arbitrary nivellation, rather a two-headed: your art is not better than our intoxicated fantasies (which are often really good), your art is not better than our found objects, game results, automatist exercises, chance methods (which are often really good), your art is not better than our silliest provocations and most speculatively headless pathetic gestures (which are not good at all, but entirely on level with much of bourgeois culture).

Dada accomplished much poetic results that cannot be reduced to anti-art: an emblematic incarnation of the radical negation and the radical departure as a starting point, automatic writing, chance methods in general, the poems of Huelsenbeck, Arp, Schwitters, Serner, Breton, Soupault, Tzara, Eluard, Péret and Kassák, the paintings of Ernst, Grosz, Arp, Duchamp, Ray, Picabia, the photography of Ray and Schad, the collages of Ernst, Hausmann, Heartfield, Höch, Charchoune, Citroën, Schwitters, the assemblages of Hausmann and Schwitters, the sculptures of Arp, Täuber-Arp and Schwitters, the films of Eggeling, Clair and Richter, yes even the sound poems of Ball, the quasitheoretical speculations of Tzara, Arp, Picabia and Duchamp, the chaotically experimental collective poems and noise music, the cultivation of the soirée format, the particular typography, etc etc.

The major part of such concrete poetical results and the methodology that gave rise to them were integrated into surrealism. Within surrealism, the privileged position of art has been denied, but without raising quietist rules of abstention; a poetic experimentation has been cultivated inside and outside art. The forms that were demonstrated for cultivating poetry outside the poem (usually not original for surrealism but realised also in romanticism, symbolism, dada and russian futurism) were picked up by the situationists and proclaimed to be the only legitimate expressions of poetry. And some time after the formulation of that theory, the situations found some support in identifying it with situations of social revolt.

But that was around the same time as the situationist movement split, partly over the question of art. But it must be admitted that those art historians are right who claim that the situationist movement did not split in a simple contradiction between artists and political activists. Both sides had artists, and neither side had political activists in any modern sense of the word; both had an interest in artistic and political concerns. Both wanted to negate art and continue making art. But one side had an artistic praxis at its base, which banalised the poetic by identifying it with this spontanistic praxis of theirs, and they developed theoretically inferior theories where radical art was paranoically-querulantly identified with freedom of speech; their political activity was noisy, querulantic and populistic. The other side avoided any basis in artistic praxis, and thereby made the poetic into something abstract since it could only be concretised in theoretical examples, and they developed an advanced and coherent theory by focusing on the field of social theory; their political activity was the intellectual leftists' usual positionings visavis ongoing struggles which they had no direct relation to (but they focused on important aspects that few others saw, and eventually the situationists and the ongoing struggles came closing in to each other and the situationists became activists too). One side's art was the other's anti-art, similar to the point of confusion, a self-righteous noisy mix of spontanism and propaganda (not without poetic ingredients).

* * *

Within surrealism, there has been a continual insistence on the confinedness, rottenness and ideological character of the art sphere; and an emphasis that those meaningful activities that many people would like to direct there could advantageously be cultivated in completely different connections, openly collective, experimental, playful and nonconformist ones; either in the surrealist movement itself or in local initiatives, on-the-side forums and utopian workshops, festivals or mystifying everyday initiatives. Many like to emphasise the polemical denial of the art sphere further, and when this is combined with an interest in the situationists' social-theoretical criticism of the image, there are occasional attempts to launch moratioria against some or all forms of artistic creation.

In fact, the surrealist manifesto of 1924 was nurtured by the vanguardist hope that automatism and surrealist games and mediality shortly would completely replace artistic concerns and the entire art sphere. This soon came to a disappointment, not the least since it turned out that questions that were in one way or another artistic questions remained central even for the surrealists themselves and seemed partly central in the cultivation of poetry. Successively these claims were weakened until abandoned with the 1929 manifesto (where surrealism effectively ceased being a vanguardism).

Yes, if the situationist movement in its entirety is seen like an extremist sect within the broad surrealist movement, then the Situationist International after the split 1962 was one such instance of denial-moratorium. And at the same time it held exhibitions and designed journals, and insisted that this was something completely different than the confusingly similar art.

The Stockholm surrealist group too suggested a moratorium in the declaration "Open letter to Guy Girard" in the 90s. No formal evaluation has been done of this, but it became obvious that none of the extra-artistic forms at hand were completely satisfactory substitutes for the directions of investigation collected in artistic creation.

Then the Madrid surrealist group came with their declaration eventually widespread as "The false mirror". In the original version this text relaunches the situationist critique, but makes an explicit exception for the artistic praxis of surrealism itself. Over time however, application was sharpened, and led to the current point where the Madrid group has an apparently complete inner ban on production of images (which strangely enough mainly covers painting, while documentary photography and poetic writing can go on) and still keep arguing for it within the surrealist movement.

And art-stopping can still be relevant, mainly as an experiment. A moratorium against artistic creation in the right situation is really an interesting way to explore what ways the creative impulses will then take, and may reveal new possibilities. A moratorium that is permanented becomes ideology. A moratorium which isn't even a moratorium but excepts one's own praxis is not just ideology but pure self-deception and marketing.

* * *

"Art for art's sake" is on the literal level obviously pointless, but the formula has occasionally been one to gather around to hold various utilistic demands on art at bay, defending creativity in accordance with inner necessity against various political and commercial decrees. Nowadays, it seems like the vast sphere of antiart and neighboring conceptual art, performance art and political art (selfbiographical art, postmodern art, etc etc) strangely subscribes to it in quite another conditional sense, wanting to paradoxically conserve the privileged place of art while claiming the obsoleteness of traditional criteria (or any criteria at all) so that the art sphere simply becomes a pool of available resources that we can all compete for in a big free-for-all. Some are happy with securing exposure for their political propaganda (usually exposure in confined art connections where it makes very little sense), some are happy to remain underground artists as long as they get regular stipends and grants, while many are violently competitive over the favors of the bureaucrats (on stipend boards etc) and intermediates (agents and gallery owners) and the sales figures - increasingly less as a means of even old-school humanist-style bourgeois "personal development" and increasingly less with the actual art as their argument; increasingly more as a naked competition game about impressive cvs, useful contacts and effective marketing strategies. For many bourgeois feminists, some upward-mobile working class heroes, and for some ultraliberal cynics in general, the right to make a career (also without really having anything to say) becomes a political agenda itself.

The only radical general view on art remains that creativity must accept no external decrees, and no isolation from other areas of life. It is then of uttermost importance that the latter must be implimented not in the reduction of art to already available utilistic concerns (income, propaganda), but quite on the other hand, the demand to adapt daily life to the inner necessities and the profound curiousness and overall creativity that can't be confined to art.

Thus, the point where art by its own dynamics will and must coincide with politics (even in the narrow sense of the word) is in the struggle against work. The ongoing struggles to reduce the workday, to subvert work ethics, to find alternative collective solutions, to defend play and laziness and mad herculean tasks, is also the most immediate political question of art, and the one where it may make sense to be an activist in the role of artists (apart from that it is very difficult to see how artists would be politically active as artists rather than as anybody, or not). The immediate need to secure time and circumstances for everybody to do what seems meaningful and to be able to organise their sociality and habits according to real demands of creativity and curiosity rather than this ever hardening imposed nonsense, which not just exhausts and exploits, but poisons the spirit and recreates life in its own image.

The art sphere needs to be set aside, not inflated by incorporating thousands of vain gestures against it. Bickerings over the concept of art, over recognition as artists, over the distribution of subsidies, have very little to do with the human creativity, imagination, curiousness and playfulness that will keep going on in other spheres in life, and, for the time being, even in art.

MF

Surrealist and situationist superheroes

Superhero groups are rather similar to surrealist groups. Both are egregoric-dynamic collectivities that embody something completely different than the sum of the individuals, both live in worlds where everything is possible and personal problems are intertwined with matters of life and death and the future of the universe, both are organised based on the unusual powers of individuals. I have once written a comprehensive essay comparing surrealist groups and Marvel superhero groups, and will not go further into it here. But I recently had reason to ponder upon the work in this area by Grant Morrison, who famously designed both a surrealist superhero group and a situationist superhero group within the confines of ordinary commercial superhero comics.

Grant Morrison is a typical comicbook writer of the type that became popular in the late 80s and early 90s; an academic bum with a fetishist thing for popular culture, thus preferring to scatter the fruits of his reading as if it was his own ideas in new commercial forums before writing essays and theses. That part of the comic-reading audience that is made up of similar intellectual bums will be enthusiastic about catching all the allusions and references, that part which is uneducated teenagers will think its unitelligable but very original and perhaps great. Morrison is skilled and knows how to develop a captivating storyline.

Grant Morrison wrote DC's Doom Patrol 1989-92. This group is already of the arguably more surrealist variety of weird super hero groups (consisting of monsters, madmen, robots, mythological beings, animals etc; held together by ad-hoc forces while their asociality, depressivity, misanthropy or unruliness makes the centrifugal forces far overtrump the centripetal forces; not consciously striving to save the world but ending up by chance fighting with an extremely weird rogue gallery - just like Marvels 70s Defenders, and, to be sure, the original Doom Patrol which started already 1963). But then Morrison adds to his already blazing ambition to be as weird as possible his whole baggage of 20th century art history, popular occultism and conspiracy theory, Illuminati, jungian psychology, postsituationist psychogeography, etc etc. A wealth of references to the more well-known aspects of surrealist art and poetry, to dreams and automatism, to alchemy and hidden traditions, etc. And strangely enough, it works. It works by creating an interesting dynamic with a life of its own between the weird characters, and between them and the weird plots they make up och end up within; just like superhero comics do when they work; experimental mythology. The rather shallow play with general textuality, psychopathology, fiction structure, metadiscourse, deleuzian machines, hidden truths and altered states, are put to work in a nice way in the confrontations between these pathetic cosmic schemes and the weird normality. Even the laborously construed simulations of surrealism, in automatic speech and dalinian landscapes, are actually quite effective.

Somewhat later, he drew more heavily on the conspiracy themes and created a postsituationist superhero team put into a pandemonium of references, with DC/Vertigo's Invisibles 1994-2000. Here the dynamics of the story were more hampered by the wealth of references, and it turned out largely uninteresting except as a symptom and possible test case of the situationist notions of recuperation; when a major company were willing to sell a new title mainly on its hyperradical image, this was obviously a negation of these very ideas, but perhaps they could also turn the boards again with providing a platform for genuinely radical misunderstandings of these radical signs turned commercial signs? I can't say if The Invisibles ever worked that way, and I find it in general disappointing, and of course it turned out that the systematic oppression that this insurrectional group was fighting was a machination of an extremely powerful evil conspiracy and not the product of a certain economic system called capitalism...

Doom Patrol works better since even simulated surrealism sometimes has a tendency to orchestrate surrealist mechanisms. Parodies of surrealism are sometimes excellent surrealism. For many, if intending to produce a line of supposedly automatic writing, it might be easier to just write something quickly and in the absence of rational control and aesthetic and moral concerns than to elaborately make something up... And even in the latter case, as methods employing overdetermination show, images resulting from the most elaborate systems of disorientation and self-challenge have a tendency to end up similar to products of the automatic overdetermination of dreaming and poetic creation...

eating it up: limbs, offspring, void and all

To try to sum up the issue of the relationship between surrealism and situationism (at this point still without having read Joël Gayraud's "Le peu de l'ombre" or the recent "Surréalistes et situationnistes, vies parallèles, histoire et documents" by Jérôme Duwa):

Yes, situationism is best considered as one of the dissident surrealist endeavours, organisationally distinct from the surrealist movement in order to gain the independence needed to make certain new emphasises, new experiments, new experiences; experiences which it is subsequently up to us to reintegrate in a general surrealist framework. In the 50s and 60s there seems to still have been a primarily polemical relation between the situationists and french surrealists (note in Joubert's highly recommendable book "Le Mouvement des Surréalistes, ou le fin mot de l'Histoire" 1997 the anecdote of Jean Schuster's chasing off Elisabeth Lenk because she was seeing the situationists too), while belgian and american, probably also british and dutch surrealism was always more positively inclined. And then in the 70s also the french seems to have started reevaluating situationism (el Janaby, LeBrun etc).

So when Tony Pusey and I (and others) were shouting for the need to reintegrate situationism into surrealism in 1988, it was pretty much enforcing already opened doors, and even more so when the Stockholm group kept repeating this over and over again such as in the international letter of 2003 and even in the recent "Voices of the hell-choir".

On the other hand, a perhaps new polarisation has been settling, between certain hyperradical and more or less iconoclastic groups and certain more or less traditionalists guardians of the purity of poetry, and the question is again on the agenda. I have been among those shouting in favour of situationist ideas, but recently I have increasingly been having a problem with many of the young groups (and also not even young ones) who occasionally use situationist rhetorics, reference to situationist ideas, etc as a motivation or legitimation for not caring much about imagination, for announcing new anathemas about pictures, for painting the world in black and white and prefer ultraradical rhetorics over actual analysis, or generally for subsuming poetry under politics, again...

So again, yes, situationism is a part of surrealist experience and of surrealist theory development attempts, just like Bataille, Artaud, parts of psychedelia and occultism and even pataphysics etc etc, but just like all of these outside endeavours also in themselves quite different from surrealism in spirit. And there I feel there is reason to give the traditionalists right if they claim that there are surrealist polemics and perhaps even entire surrealist strategies which are fuelled by the seductiveness of the absolutist cerebral negativity of Debord, which will be suffocating for, or just opposed to, real vigilance towards poetry. But on the other hand, to understand and be informed by the situationist theories and the experiences from the situationist movement, I think is of fairly crucial importance for contemporary surrealism.

PS
But then I also would like to adress the question from a more espistemological perspective... So let's speak about Debord, who obviously is an important thinker. (Unlike Vaneigem, who is more obviously surrealist, and basically just a superficial propagandist of simplified themes from surrealism, not entirely unlike certain parts surrealism itself...)

And I think much of the problem lies in Debord's particular anti-empiricism. It is indeed a strong current in France, rooted in traditional french rationalism, but getting a new legitimation when forged with german idealism, such as in the case of Debord's excited hegelianism. Since only the rational is real and only the real is rational, and since the part reflects the whole as much as the whole reflects its parts, then an inspired idea becomes truth, not a hypothesis to be investigated, but truth itself; and a revealing interpretation about one phenomenon must be true as a universal rule about the current situation too! There is no question of checking against reality, since the dynamics of the explanation creates its truth regardless of whatever empirical evidence might say. In this sense, for example Althusser in spite of his contempt for Hegel is just as much a notorious french hegelian as ever Debord is. And both are inspiring and dynamical in their denudation of current society based on their theoretical omniscience, and the question to what extent and under what circumstances their conclusions are applicable is a non-question within the framework of their theories! (OK, this anti-methodological stance is far more developed in Debord than in Althusser who sticks to some methodological rhetorics after all.)

And even if this anti-empiricist trend is clearly discernible in surrealism too, I would say that most surrealists are more interested in the empirical and experimental; most, such as Breton, more on the level of inner experience and particularly revealing anecdotes rather than any controlled observations, repetitions or statistics of course, but still a clearly empirical focus.
       
Within the Debordian antiempiricism, very much of its dynamics and even truly seductive power lies in its absolute negativism. It is like a novel by Thomas Bernhard. This world is so entirely capitalist, and not just general capitalist but spectacularly capitalist and capitalistically spectacular, so that every single element in it becomes a murderous confirmation of the totality and allencompassingness of the spectacle and fascism of this system, etc etc. In this absolute wholeness of the spectacle, any opposite to it is only conceivable philosophically, as a pure negation, which is then identified with pure revolt and with a sense of pure poetry which is taken from surrealism from severed from context, so that the extended-generalised sense of poetry becomes the core meaning without any reference to the central-literal sense of poetry, which indeed is instead put in absolute opposition to it and considered entirely subsumed under the spectacle. In this way, while still referring to many of the same particular instances of poetry as surrealism does, poetry in the situationist sense is entirely abstract, since it is based in a rational construction of an absolute opposition and not in experience, experiment, empirical foundations, imagination. It seems like it is all based on the very seductiveness of speculative thinking rather than on real experiences in the flesh (which includes the fleshy imagination and the imaginative flesh...) This is very much in congruence with strands of nihilist, negative mysticist, Nietzschean and anarchist ultraradicalism but as I perceive it quite distinct from the romantical anticapitalist, utopian mysticist, current which is the core thread in surrealism. Again, I don't think they are mutually exclusive, but I think it is important that it is the surrealist main frame which must define and evaluate the uses of nihilism and not vice versa.

(MF thought he wrote this text, but others insisted it was merdarius)

Soluble locus

What is this place called place

Some places are more places than others. But sometimes more is less. Places have tons of determinations. Global coordinate systems, positions assumed in our networks of associations and perceptions, its social productivity, biological productivity, monetary productivity; what it is used for, has been shaped by being used for, what it could possibly be used for if we want; what situated it in relation to surrounding topography, what created its soil layer, what plants and fungi colonised it when, what animals use it when and how, what are the optical and metereological conditions, who died there and who wrote a poem there and who tried to seduce whom there, and so on. This and other aspects difficultly measured will give them particular presences or absences, particular suggestivenesses and expectancies. I am not using the terms atmosphere or ambiance here, just because I sometimes suspect them to be just euphemisms for soul, which I might have said too, but which will often stand in the way of a real investigation of the factors actually involved.

Many intellectuals of conservative leanings tend to mythologise place hierarchically, primarily in terms of patria. Others, more liberal, tend to oligolectically associate places with more or less exotic anecdotes to fit a cosmopolitan image, involving either a globalisation nivellation, or good old tourist exotism, or both intermixed. But, it cannot be empasised enough, the biographical self is just one epistemological organ among others. An important one, providing much of the emotional reverbations, a good deal of the stories, a good deal of all the irrational associations and psychological overdeterminations. But real mythology, which might be described as acknowledging the ghosts we have intercourse with, presupposes availability more than anything, just like poetry, and thus all the biographical material is just a wagonload of suggestions, which might selectively be grabbed and put to use by the meaning in formation, or not. The notion of a patria is a strictly regressive one on the mythological and psychological levels, and of course one usually associated with reactionary political purposes. To see place as a setting for anecdotes is a slightly more dynamic position, but exotism and lack of exotism are equally powerful in potentially hiding specificity and particular possibilities from view. The more interesting a place is, the more it has qualities of terra incognita, something we may have rumors, dreams and prejudices about, but which primarily in itself encourages us to an active investigation of its possibilities. Consider the place a playground, yourself having gotten the task of inventing the game appropriate to it.

In the mid-90s the surrealist group in Stockholm focused much of its geographical investigations in the concept of worthless places (or atoposes), all the corners and borderzones falling between chairs, falling out of use, getting invaded by unintended usages. It could be emphasised that the criterion is largely an economic one and the setting more or less necessarily urban: only in cities is the population dense enough and the land prices high enough for any disused space to be so strongly singled out, to acquire the quality of a focus of resistance and dreaming. Other environments are organised in other ways.

Some other groups picked up the concept, particularly the Leeds group which had already from its beginnings a geographical focus parallelling ours (and preferring the probably more grammatically correct plural form atopoi). In later investigations other aspects have taken the lead, particularly in Madrid, developing concepts largely opaque to us (such as?), or in Eric Bragg's inexhaustible documentation of abandoned environments in northern California, or in Bruno Jacobs' concept of "poetic places", or in SLAG's "urban rockpooling" etc. The interface visavis popular "urban exploring" more or less based in live role playing games and situationist theory, is not yet specified. The many scattered surrealist experiments in natural, rural or suburban environments have been fruitful but perhaps not offered similar methodological conclusions.

In Stockholm we have also focused particularly on dream geography (recently at Kormorantrådet),
both the question of how space is constructed in the dream and how dreams affect our geographical orientation in general.

Together with a sense of nature geography which is perhaps more of my own personal interest, this was investigated in my novel Dreamgeography naturegeography . This sense of nature geography is about how our observations of animals, plants, stones, landforms and weathers are crucial in establishing our sense of space, our psychogeography. In this sense, it is obviously depending on the degree of selective attention and of background knowledge. But there is of course also a sense in twhich these aspects give places their position objectively.

Psychogeography was a slightly different concept when the lettrists developed it and later used it as situationists, focusing particularly on the ideological and counterideological manipulation of mental structures through city planning and experimental urban drifting, and we have, in parallel with an academic discipline which we don't know if it exists or not, deliberately generalised it into a phenomenology of space and strategies of orientation in general.

Birds, which like humans are obsessed with large-scale spatial orientation, rely mostly on visual gestalt but also seem to have a keen sense of magnetism facilitating navigation. The gestalt sense of humans is one the other hand exceedingly complex, usually resulting in quite conflicting signals which are finally resolved in a rational analysis. Here we are. We have no memory of how we might have ended up in this place where we feel we might be. Spatial recognition, if not a pastime among others, will start approaching that beautiful and profane description of mystical knowledge as the instantaneous recollection of the sum of associations to an object (where was it? Joseph Jablonski, "Surrealist implications of chance" 1976, I think). A good guess as to where one is includes all the motionless summer evenings there, all the puns and etymological speculations around its name, the taste of the soil, the ambiguous hopes of dawn, the noise of birds, the land use history, the public transport system leading there, the dream syntheses it will become part of. The notion of home does not make sense. The only adequate identification with place is an experimental and playful one, regardless of whether it lasts for just the duration of an instantaneous practical-joke-type kiss or a moment which lasts for centuries, turning us to stone, and whether we are ultimately capable of distinguishing between the two.

Mattias Forshage 3.iii

VOICES OF THE HELL CHOIR - aspects of contemporary surrealist activity, its modes of rhetoric and its ludicism

The history of the postbretonian surrealist movement (1) disenvelops through historical contingencies and particular conditions which are partly common for surrealism on the whole and partly particular for the different cultural/ regional contexts.
It seems like the least common denominator of most contemporary activities is an on-going playing/ experimentation and critical/poetological/methodological/political discussion. In addition to this, greater or smaller effort is made in a spectrum of other activities, which are still rather fundamental but still more or less optional in each different context. They are * critical positioning visavis contemporary art, literature, science, politics etc * organisational questions/ democracy/ securing information availability/ internal updating, * international contacts/ discussions/ collaborations/ initiatives, * investigating, evoking, evaluating and/or defending surrealist (and pre- and parasurrealist) traditions, * keeping contacts/ collaborating with progressive political and artistic forces on the home ground, * endless walking/ dérive/ urban exploration/ mingling with the underground, * keeping each other updated in the fields of everyone’s individual creativity, * publications, * public performances, poetry readings, exhibitions, concerts, soirées, etc, * political initiatives, all kinds of sabotage, agitation, leaflet distributing, disturbing or obstructing normal order, detourning the urban environment, etc. The list could be made longer or shorter. Most groups will spend time with a lot of these but not all.
But international communication does not regularly account for all of this, and a lot of it is usually very difficult to discern in groups elsewhere. It’s very much channeled through a certain rhetoric, which may seem to dominate the external picture of the group. This rhetoric apparently usually conforms to one of three preponderances; a propagandistic mode, a subjectivistic mode, or an analytical mode. Each of them can be important part of an integrated surrealist project, and each can become more or less sterile when overemphasized or exclusive. It seems like the ludic sphere, and the determination to give the ludic activities their rightful central place, can offer cures for such imbalances or at least the arena for such a cure.
I will discuss these rhetorical modes, and it is important to remember that I am trying to discuss them as objective modes, and not the communicational strategies of specific groups. Each group will be able to draw upon the different modes and employ them for different purposes, typically in different textual genres, but it’s quite evident that for each group one rhetoric mode appears to dominate their output, or at least that part of the output which is internationally available, giving each group a sort of ”strategical image” in relation to the other groups. In spite of this objectivity ambition, some critical remarks on specific examples have been grouped under the relevant headings.
Admittedly, these rhetorical modes are all useful in different circumstances, and they also provide a lot of the obvious objective differences between groups. Thus they should not be evaluated in terms of some being legitimate and some not, regardless of whether in order to disregard certain groups as pseudo-surrealists or revisionists, or to complacently regret the lack of spontaneous affinity with some. Our solidarity should be solid enough to span over these differences and be able to recognise them among the conditions for communication, but also a continuous topic for any kind of critical discussion between us. Thus, the intention is to pinpoint some of the obvious pitfalls of each mode and some issues that need to be discussed; that is, to provide some input to a multilateral critical discussion on concrete topics within the movement; not to slander or point out anyone specifically, perhaps this time not even to consciously provoke… Unfortunately, in the Stockholm group we have given priority to other things than international communication for many years now (to an extent that at least I deeply regret), but it turned out that only very few were inclined to respond to our international letter of january 2004 at all. Recently, at least two new contacts were surprised that we were still active, having heard the opposite from the french group. So, we haven’t had much substantial correspondence with the french for some years, but as far as we know we have been sending each other the usual amount of polite, impersonal, forwarded information and similar, that could be considered the pessimistic baseline of international communication. (The fact that the rumour of our death has been spread by other sources and in other fora too is a partly amusing and partly frustrating but perhaps not too interesting issue.) Several times the idea has been proposed by different groups to collect that kind of general information (with a dose of sifting) into regular reports from each group, and some groups have occasionally tried it as well, but the lack of response (and sometimes the considerable effort of editing it or agreeing on it?) has made this mere occasional outbursts. Then a lot of discussion will go on between individuals who have developed parti-cular bilateral discussions, and a lot of discussion will go on between those who have the time to hang out on internet forums and bomb mailinglists on a regular basis – a lot of time will certainly be needed, not only to formulate your own ideas and keep defending them against all kinds of misunderstandings, but even more to sift the gems of serious discussion from the piles of mere frustration, ignorance, personal contradictions, personal opinions and other personal expositions. Sometimes ludic invitations and more anecdotal or subjective questionnaires have it easier to produce substantial response, but for a long time we have been feeling that even though such inititiatives are generally important to promote, they do also feel a little ”loosely hanging” and possibly even having a false ring IF we are not able to discuss critical issues, our fundamental commitments and strategical choices, similarities and differences in these, simultaneously.

I.
The propagandistic mode of surrealism is one of the strongest elements in postbretonian surrealism. It contains hyperradicalism, aggressivity and rash theoretical simplifications. Actually it seems to have borrowed very much of its rhetorics from Vaneigem, whose situationist agitation in itself is little more than a populistic-light-surrealism. In reintegrating that part of the situationist arsenal into surrealism along with the other, more interesting parts, we have definitely bought back our own pig in worse shape. This tendency might have been there in at least some tracts of earlier surrealism too (from 27/1 1925 onwards), but far less before the 60’s, far less before Breton’s death and before the general leftist upheaval of the late 60’s widely disseminated the situationists’, Marcuse’s and others’ simplified or simplifiable theories.
If for a moment we don’t refrain from invoking cultural stereotypes this strategy could be considered an americanisation of surrealism, integrating into surrealism elements of the loudmouthed, shallow, un-selfcritical voluntarism typical for the american stereotype. But even though several american surrealist groups have been active in employing this rhetorical mode for a long time, it must be noted that: * they are certainly not alone in the world in doing that, * they have also carried the banner of a (necessary but admirable) antiamericanism, and * that from an analytical perspective it would seem highly unsatisfactory to refer to such stereotypes and not look for specific historical explanations.
One such is obviously available, to the extent that the death of Breton did put the surrealist movement in a sort of legitimity crisis. With Breton as the living embodiment of the heritage, there was never a doubt (at least not internally) who was the carriers of the torch, but without him, there were definitely a lot of different ideas around regarding how to carry on, and who was the more legitimate, the truer to the spirit, etc. In some cases it was a matter of conflict between different alternatives as to how to proceed, in other cases it was more about how to establish a sense of exclusive authencity without there being anyone around with the authority to entrust you with that. Not unexpectedly this rhetoric is common in new/young groups who are eager to establish their right of speaking in the name of surrealism and claiming its whole heritage in spite of their own lack of experience and ”credentials”. Aggressivity and ”raptured selfconfidence” (as a swedish tract actually pro-claimed) is certainly a rational strategy in that context, even where it is also one potentially destructively dominating over other modes in the surrealist activity, and one leading to a number of fatal oversimplifications in the general outlook.
Common flaws intimately intertwined with this rhetoric is of course the general tendency to see things in black and white, including putting a totally unproblematised faith in individual creativity and urge for freedom, in for example eroticism, desire and/or love, and more generally in a given spectrum of valueladen concepts, and a corresponding unproblematised belief in the intelligent design of the conspiracy of all kinds of domination, sometimes even a general depreciation of objective reality as such, and also including the grotesque overevaluation of the revelatory nature of one’s own creative and critical work, as well as the identifying of one’s own activity/ rhetoric as a sufficient lithmus paper – so that anyone attracted to one’s ranting is better than others, while everybody repelled by it thereby proves themselves to be objective enemies of surrealism without any significant contributions or opinions to make. The mechanisms of recuperation are often imagined as a conscious conspiration of silence and active marginalisation against living surrealism and its revolutionary aspirations. It tends to fuel a practical focus of speaking a lot more about surrealism than speaking surrealism, and so merely defending rather than inventing surrealism.
So, in this mode there exists an obsession with legitimity as the ”true voice of surrealism” versus everybody else who represent falsaria, and an aggressive selfdefence versus all of these. In fact, most inaugural declarations of new surrealist groups starts with (and sometimes spend most of the text with) complaining over the general contemporary misunderstanding of what surrealism is, instead of presenting what their specific visions/ contributions/ sensibilities might be. This is a bit selfcontradictory; of all the things the surrealist project might consist of, the task of correcting misapprehensions of surrealism cannot be considered a CENTRAL issue if the grand revolutionary and creative ambitions are not chimerical.
Art and literature history and criticism (both academic and popular) presents surrealism as if it was a movement and/or style in art and literature. Not surprising, because otherwise they would have no reason to talk about it all, since a surrealist project grasped in its entirety goes way beyond their jurisdiction. If they would grasp it they would be less likely to be content with being historians och critics within art and literature, but even if they were, it would still be the artistic or literary output of surrealism which would be most relevant for them to discuss within their professional field. So what? And then they often do not take a big interest in contemporary surrealist activities, and often deny it in any way they can. But what we do is in no way aimed at getting confirmation and good grades from them, in fact it’s only good if we can pursue the core of our activities in peace from the public eye, and only intervene in the public sphere when we choose to do so ourselves from particular strategic angles, without illusions of being fairly represented, isn’t it?
Then furthermore, a lot of people present their creative output on the internet, some in local low-brow art events, some in advertising, some in official art. In all these places, some people call their work surrealist without knowing too much of the history or theoretical part of surrealism. For most, the association will be very shallow or arbitrary. A lot of them won’t produce works that are of any interest whatsoever for us. Some of them will, more or less independently of how much they actually knew about surrealism.
All these people, employing the term surrealism in the sense that makes it meaningful for their own activity, will often be way off mark and part of objective recuperation – but objective recuperation will work regardless of how we judge single voices. Apart from errors of historical facts (which may not be our task to correct) it will always be only inner criteria that draw the line between relevant and irrelevant conceptions of (comments on, contributions to) surrealism. Anything officially represented in the consensus knowledge of present society is objectively a part of its ideology. In my opinion, the only thing that would make it matter what the marketeers of that ideology say about surrealism is whether it might scare off people that could make substantial contributions to it. And certainly, most people could probably make such contributions under very radicalised circumstances. But probably not at present. We have no interest in followers. In the present, surrealism is factually (and has no particular reason to regret it) a minoritary endeavour, carried on by those who are interested/energetic enough to have found it and found a way to practice it by inner necessity. To some people, the particular spark of imagination and reenchantment and diehard curiosity towards all kinds of marginal phenomena of objective reality, and/or the desire for revolt against the narrow concepts of rationality, sociality and life on the whole, will be something they recognise in surrealism from their own insatiable thirst; and these persons will probably find this to a larger extent in an academic book of surrealist paintings than in a tract yelling at misunderstandings (examplifying the notion of the two-way working of recuperation; a ricochet). They will probably not trust the contemporary surrealists of being the foremost fighters for freedom, imagination and love simply on our word for it; they will expect to find it manifested in remarkable works and remarkable investigations.
So why don’t we just step down from this struggle over who’s a surrealist and who’s not. For historical purposes we’ll only need a technical definition (like the one Penelope Rosemont elaborates in her Surrealist Women), and for practical contemporary purposes it will suffice for each group to choose with whom it wants to collaborate and with whom not! The only substantial way of establishing sur-realism as a presence in its totality in the relevant sectors/ substructures of present society is through the sincereness, energy and intelligence of ones own activities. The only substantial way of establishing oneselves within surrealism is by contributing innovation and poetry, sincere critical questions and suggestions. Polemics over legitimacy, over rights to designations, are rather uninteresting even where the causes may be entirely just.
For the sake of comprehensiveness, let’s recognise at this point all the merits of polemical aggressivity as well; inherently, it 1) serves to scare off a substantial lot of polite or recu-perative interest or pseudointerest (along with some of the serious interest, for sure), 2) serves to potentially radicalise exhanges of ideas and courses of events as mere provocation, and 3) serves to remind of the fundamental radicality of surrealism and the necessity of ”absolute divergence” (which of course, must be reinvented in each specific connection and never relied upon as mere safe abstentionism from risktaking), and furthermore 4) can be simply really fun. Not inherently but historically it has also in recent decades been the preferred forum for * assessment of the potential of real insurrections/ dynamical courses of events (very much in the tradition of the situationists), * critical use of (and thus not only traditional allegiance to) the theories of Marx and Freud.
So, of course it’s not wrong with a good rant now and then, but let’s try to focus a little more on true enemies and a little less on harmless and uninteresting academics, journalists and home artists, and let’s not confuse this ranting with the core issues of surrealist activity.

Notes:
(1) ”postbretonian” in a temporal sense. But not only temporal, as we will see further on.

hell choir pt 3

The crisis of legitimacy for postbretonian surrealism remains and does not remain an issue.
In a sense the easiest way to motivate continued surrealist activity is that it is a timeless endeavour. It corresponds with or innermost desires and critiques, and we feel affinities with the surrealist tradition, and so we go on forever whatever happens. In a sense, this is hopefully a part of the driving force for several of us, but note that it is perfectly compatible with for example a Schuster’s view of the surrealist movement being objectively dead while the surrealist spirit survives eternally, or on the other hand with any wellmeaning cultural snob seeing surrealism as a perpetual reminder of the imaginative sources in art and literature.
So, on the other hand, surrealism still claims to be a progressive movement, some kind of a contemporary force, a historical agent, the present face of a specific real historical movement.
Surrealism has definitely developed before. Early 20’s surrealism differs from late 20’s surrealism differs from middle 30’s surrealism etc in themes, in methodology and in strategy. At least from the second world war on, we see that a lot of the development of surrealism takes place partly outside surrealism or in undercurrents of surrealism (but probably before that as well, with for instance Bataille’s circle and Le Grand Jeu), while an ”official surrealism” was actually constructed not only by art and literature historians but actually by the french group themselves, most obviously in choosing to organise the great all-integrating partly-retrospective timeless 1947 exhibition instead of (as another suggestion at the time was) organising a conference for surrealists to develop the movement’s direction based on a confrontation and comparison of the very different experiences made during the war. In a sense, surrealism as a unified historical agent died exactly there, where for the first time the forum for coordinating/accumulating surrealist experience chose to develop not the sum and its implications but actually something else than the combined individual energies/ experiences, actually thus creating this ghost (or if you will spectacle) of ”official surrealism”. The major tracts of the late 40’s focused on RE-instating timeless themes of anti-colonialist freedom, anti-stalinist freedom, anti-religious freedom, and very consciously did not adress themes or experiences made during the war years (the journals of the same period do contain more than usual of occult-mediumistic themes and display some new artistic themes, but in the spirit of additions rather than developments).
This is NOT to say that the surrealist movement nor the french surrealist group died or reverted at that point. I’m only saying that from 1947 on the surrealist movement was definitely DIVIDED and without a historical focal point. The french group and Breton himself kept up an admirable organisational, creative and critical output and represent the single most important activity center throughout that period, but that is as one group among others, with its specific limitations, rather than a coordination center, focal point or something like that. In a sense, surrealism became ”timeless” in 1947 because it became infinitely inclusive, came to consist of the total sum of themes, works and activities that had ever been a part of it, in an indiscriminately accumulative way, instead of moving forward through new discoveries superceding and changing the meaning of the older ones, that is, without historical breaks, without coupure, without aufhebung. So the legitimity crisis of postbretonian surrealism is actually a problem for the whole postwar period, it was just that the inspiring living presence of Breton made a lot of people unaware of the fact for a few decades until he died. (4)

And what then are the objective advances of surrealism after Breton’s death? First of all, I don’t know if it’s needed or not to point out that the term ”advance” is intended as ”irreversible development” (and not necessarily ”progress for the better”, whatever that would mean). Contemporary surrealism in a sense only consists of a very wide spectrum, but for those who have chosen to link up with each other in an organisational/activist framework (what we like to refer to as a movement) there may still be some themes and some experiences that are shared. Well, we’d probably need nothing less than an international con-ference to establish that. I do NOT consider, neither as advances nor shared experiences, as some seem inclined to do, the tactical or local retreat from revolutionary politics in france and some other places in the 40s, nor the rhetorical autodissolution twists of the liquidationist faction of 1969, and probably not (but I’m open to suggestions from someone who studied – or experienced – it closer) the scattered local outbursts of enthu-siasm and optimism about more or less superficial occult, drug, humanism, mass campaign politics, or sexual themes. Instead, my suggestions for shared advances are:
* A more effective and more explicit network structure,
due to two mutually reenforcing factors:
a) Changed communication infrastructure, to which the movement has only partially responded but that partial response is still sufficient to alter our organisational framework, with in several sectors a far more effective networking, new transversal alliances, etc
b) Recognition of the lack of an organisational center and the need to base collaborations on voluntarity and mutual interest, thus creating a non-hierarchic free-association-based structure (and if you will, democratic and anarchic).
* reintegration of ”parasurrealist” traditions;
most notably the situationist movement and the work of Bataille and his circle, but also Cobra, various groups of Phases and a number of individual artists and writers. However the experiences of several other such efforts remain for the movement to suck up; for example Mass-Observation.
* a hardcore insistence on the ludic
as the core of surrealist collectivity and surrealist experience
* a renewed focus on urbanism and walking,
partly inspired by the reintegration of situationist psychogeography. (there have been tendencies to forward surrealist focus on rural and natural environments as well, but these have been much more isolated, and usually mere minor parts of more generally focused interests in either geography, biology or so-called ”ecological awareness”).
* a successive (but still far from fulfilled) re-abandonment of official culture.
In a way this was the starting point of surrealism, but rather soon the antagonism softened, and it was for many decades (and sometimes still is) nothing out of the ordinary to have members ”double-organised” contributing more or less the same type of the work to the art market, literature market or academia on the one hand and to the surrealist movement on the other hand. Of course this involves partly tricky questions about the nature of work, and about the ability of poetry to function even in coopted settings, where different groups and different individuals will keep assessing the priorities differently. What I’m suggesting here is merely that after Breton’s death the pendulum has been on a backstroke, with more new surrealists keeping the distance to official culture than striving for recognition and market shares…
* a recognition/appreciation of the surrealist aspects of popular culture,
which of course was partly present for a long time, but first made an irreducible part of the surrealist sphere of interest by the comprehensive investigation and agitation by the Chicago group in the 60s and 70s.
* Music,
a sphere made impossible to keep dismissing with a lazy quote of de Chirico’s and Breton’s (partial) lack of interest, by the number, scope and frenzy of surrealist interventions and investigations in recent decades. These concern the surrealist aspects of popular music (part of the previous point), to a lesser but still significant extent the surrealist inspiration of many 20th century composers, but most of all, the musicking of surrealists themselves including emphasizing the analogies between automatism and musical improvisation, between musical and poetical communication, etc. (Apparently, the partly analogous field of dance remains a minor topic)
* Politics.
Most surrealist groups have made some bad experiences in this field and ended up in defending the good old baseline of emphasising the politically revolutionary aspect of surrealism together with the movement’s autonomy visavis all purely political revolutionary organisations, and the freedom to associate with such in a non-sectarian manner to a lesser or greater degree in accordance with one’s own assessments of present necessities. This is fine, especially in comparison with all these mostly isolated and more or less bitter individuals who think that surrealism abandoned revolutionary politics on the whole; but still not sufficient. A lot of us have also seen the old quarrel between the two classically available alternatives of anarchism and trotskyism as totally fruitless and these alternatives in themselves clearly insufficient or even entirely outdated, and that a non-sectarian revolutionary attitude today must include an openness towards new means of struggle and more recent original theories.
* Critique of the image.
Again partly as a result of the reintegration of situationist critique, but also as a part of the general retreat from official culture and a direct response to the present overflow of all kinds of imagery stemming from the commercial sphere but effectively colonising larger part of the mind and the social; several groups (but not all) have been emphasising the need for vigilance and suspiciousness in this area and the futility of merely contributing to this flow as if nothing happened.
Some of these may not be part of the development of surrealism on the whole but belong to only certain cultural contexts, while on the other hand there may be things which I have omitted, either simply not being able to discern them or believing them to be confined to only certain cultural contexts while they are actually better regarded as parts of the development of surrealism on the whole.
Some controversial issues require more international discussion; I did put the critique of the image on the list because it appeared to be a dynamic force that united several points of activity a few years ago, but the discussion appeared to halt prematurely, just like the discussion over religion and notions of sacredness at the same time, which was perhaps even less conclusive but partly recently made topic by Ducornet’s initiative of reissuing the 1948 antireligious tract and the subsequent call for new positionisngs from the Paris group. At the same time, there is a whole field of ”anticlerical (or even profane) mysticist” practices paralelling and even tangenting surrealist focus on the imagination which is largely unexplored by the movement. I’m sure there are individuals in the movement who are more oriented than others in this and have suggestions for what currents and writers of recent or contemporary occultism/magic, unorthodox psychoanalys/ psychology etc that are more worthy of studying than others.
The attitudes towards science remain to be thoroughly discussed. There are two types of questions there. First the fascinating perspective on reality and the immense number of startling discoveries and poetic details made available in, for example, particle dynamics, spacetime theory and the whole of quantum physics, scientific cosmology and astronomy in general, metereology, systems ecology and microbiology, evolutionary theory and genetics, plate tectonics and geomorphology, quaternary geology and palaeoecology, cladistics and probability theory, cybernetics and general linguistics, etc (as I’m personally able to gather many examples only from the biological and geological fields and not other ones, I’ll leave that for some other occasion). All fascinating, but also partly coming into conflict with con-victions held dear in the surrealist tradition.
Second the focus on methodology and epistemology. How many remember today that the surrealist watchword coupure is actually Bachelard’s description of the leap from prejudice to scientific thinking? Actually there is so much to gain in adopting the methodological stance; to design ones projects specifically to be able to give results regardless of ones prejudices, to always ask how things can be known and investigated rather than if they feel true or false, to abandon faith and custom to be able to identify anything novel, unexpected, counterintuitive etc. In a sense this has always been a part of the core of surrealism, but there is very often a distinct sloppyness in methodology, a tendency to stop halfways and jump to conclusions from there, very often in order to artistically or literarily exploit the investigation and then leave it behind. I’m not saying we should all become scientists (though it would be fun!), simply that there is a lot to gain from straightening up the methodology and pose epistemological questions.

The nature of the traditional allegiance to hegelian philosophy and freudian psychology (despite their continuing relevance!) and the superficial rejection of the whole poststructuralist sphere (despite its many deep flaws!) is something that seems partly shaky and demands a critical discussion in the movement, also being the perhaps most concrete aspect of an the apparent lagging behind in theoretical issues. Antihumanism is actually one of the most radical pillars of modern poetry on the whole, present in surrealist ludic/collective/”mediumistic” practices but very often discussed on only the most shallow of levels or even denied; it remains a critical issue for the surrealists to develop a relevant understanding of specifically in this period. Issues posed by for instance feminism and queer theory, of intergender power relations, microlevel democracy and social domination issues on the whole, have certainly advanced and reshaped the movement during the period, but in these issues the surrealist movement very often seem to be lagging a little bit behind other parts of society, in spite of having some extremely radical perspectives to offer; why it is so certainly demands a discussion. Partly this overlaps with the necessity to refocus on eroticism and its potential and pitfalls in present society where the configuration and role of sexuality is partly much different from in the days of classic surrealism. While we´re at it we could also need some fresh perspectives on the role of love.
In all these questions surrealism should have something to say, and possibly a lot of us would be capable of reaching some common understanding of the present necessities. In several of them there appeared to be a broader discussion on its way a few years ago. The difficulties at the time of organising the publication of the international surrealist bulletin seemed to postpone the discussions. (Of course it’s possible that the discussion kept on, only we were much out of circulation; in that case, we’d be happy to see the developments!) Anyway, during the years, digital communication has become increasingly available and reliable, so we should be able to carry on a serious discussion more swiftly now, shouldn’t we?







Mattias Forshage (5)


Notes:
(4) We were very happy to find this course shift acknowledged and emphasised in Michael Richardson’s and Krzysztof Fijalkowski’s anthology Sur-realism against the Current.
(5) The text has been thoroughly discussed and largely approved (but not necessarily in its entirety) by the Stockholm surrealist group and also incorporating important comments from Merl Storr of the SLAG group