A few cases of calendrical and nomenclatural confusion, hipy papy
A celebration of what?
It has been confusing, throughout 2024, to see several surrealists rallying to official celebrations, even state-run celebrations and celebrations that claim that this year represents the centennial of surrealism.
A centenarian is allowed some confusion, and it’s probably not polite to question its age or its identity at the party. Cake is earned by survival, and it’s not true that the elderly have a less sweet tooth than children. For some, politeness extends to nodding and accepting any doddering, but it would be overeager to actually start revising one’s general concepts to adapt to whatever is being said, wouldn’t it?
To begin with, an official celebration is at best an ambiguous opportunity, and for a radical idea usually mainly a hostile act. This is wellknown. With agents of all colours peacefully joining in and paying hommage to a historical phenomenon which they are all free to define as they like and thus reduce to whatever is specifically useful for them personally or professionally, this clearly includes not just a wateringdown and a disarming but also a strong claim that surrealism is historically finished, that the packaging and interpretation of it into official history is up for grabs, so that curators with a salary, eager academics, merchants and entrepeneurs, and early career artists all have equal authority on the topic and then any angry activists can be safely ignored along with the predictable cynical old radicals. A celebration of surrealism might possibly be an opportunity for exposing surrealist images, texts and anecdotes, and it might be great fun for professionals who honestly enjoy surrealist works, but it is always an attempted murder on surrealist activity, surrealist experience and surrealist autonomy. Whatever recognition surrealism is granted, it does not include the right to speak for itself.
Secondly, surrealism was born in 1922. That’s when the group was gathered and started using the name surrealism for its experiments with automatism and other things. In spring and summer 1924 there were a few polemics over the right to the term in the journals, but then in october finally Breton’s Manifesto was published along with Aragon’s, followed by the journal La Revolution surréaliste, making an uncontestable claim for the term on behalf of this collective and this activity. But if you want to celebrate the centennial of surrealism, that would have been 2022.
Strangely enough, both these basic facts were pointed out in unambiguous terms by the Paris group in their 2022 tract “Au pied ailé de la lettre” (good tract!). The same Paris group which is now in the forefront of handing over the responsibility of surrealism’s heritage to the French state and the local tourist industry in Lot while participating in the broad official 2024 celebration and, as a weird sidestory, whose members kneel to the pope (!).
So what does it mean? Let’s just say that if this is the 100th anniversary of surrealism, as many say, then surrealism is not the conscious surrealist mindset, the surrealist group, and the surrealist activity, but only the public outlet under the label surrealism.
Makes sense, perhaps, in the light of a lot of some developments in the recent times.
It’s not a surprise that cultural institutions including those in the form of private enterprises hold up such celebrations. It’s their job, and it’s even perhaps an exciting contrast to duller professional tasks. But again, their work in defining, explaining, circumscribing and packaging surrealism is relatively unproblematic only if there is no living surrealism to contest, ignore or elude their attempts and come out as a sort of logical winners – in the sense that surrealist activity makes surrealism whereas cultural institutions’ concerns with surrealism can only comment on surrealism made by others, elsewhere.
And why would surrealists accept that? Well maybe if the trend of uncritical exhibitionism has gone far enough, then it doesn’t matter so much what the context is, it is just yet another opportunity to submit and expose one’s images (or one’s poems or one’s ego).
And then the two year delay makes sense too. The celebration is not about surrealism, it is about public surrealism, surrealist publishing and exhibiting, surrealism for an audience. And exposure may, to some of these current aspiring surrealist artists and online networkers, be far more important than surrealism. An opportunity to expose one’s work in celebration of the exposing of surrealist works, rather than of surrealism.
Journals of what?
I just noticed, while updating my list of surrealist periodicals (including vaguely or allegedly such), that several of the more confused and peripheral neosurrealist or surrealismoid journals have folded in recent years (such as Surreal Poetics, Voyzx Art, Caliban Online and at last the abominable SurVision).
But then among the new ones, some were weirdly intruiging.
You may have noticed that the academic students of surrealism in recent years joined forces in an International Society for the Study of Surrealism, a professional academic endeavour that wouldn’t have much consequences for surrealism itself, except perhaps that some surrealists have again been seduced by the opportunity for exposure and joined in for some of their conferences, a few for bathing in pre-posthumous semi-official recognition for a life in the service of the cause, a few schizophrenically doubling as surrealismologists themselves, a few perhaps even trying to remind the academics that there is contemporary surrealism, which is of course something picturesque and nice as long as it is not recognised that this might potentially undermine their own authority, but then it probably won’t as long as people are just happy for exposure.
And now this organisation has launched their official organ under the title “International Journal of Surrealism”. A little logical abyss opens.
Wait, do they actually mean it? Does the cuddling actually extend to this journal encouraging surrealist contributions? No. They publish academic papers, about surrealism. How can this be the journal of surrealism? Unless they claim that the study of surrealism is surrealism. How would that work? Is surrealism a very broad concept that includes the study of itself? Which itself? Well at least in that case they have solved the problem of their widespread relying on secondary material (each others’ commentaries on surrealism) rather than primary source material (expressions of surrealism), if their own commentaries are in fact as much genuine surrealism as surrealism is! Which also solves the aforementioned unequality, and surrealists aren’t in any way privileged before surrealismologists to make surrealism anymore! But then, what is it actually that they are studying? Is there a core phenomenon at base anymore? Or is it all just a vortex of metacommentary? Is surrealism everything, or is surrealism the empty untouchable void in the middle?
Either way, if everything about surrealism is surrealism, and especially the public face of surrealism is more surrealism than surrealist spirit and surrealist activity, then another magazine suddenly makes sense: the fashion magazine “Surreal Mag”. (It’s for real!) Who can say in 2024 that that is something else than genuine surrealism? Well, it is not specifically about surrealism so it might not obviously fit the academics’ concept, but for the happy celebrators of the public face of surrealism, what can be more public and more happy than surrealism’s diffusion into mainstream capitalism, fashion as well as tourist industry? If it is not surrealism that is surrealism, then who can say that either of these applications are irrelevant or wrong?
When are we?
Times are confused and in many ways more unfavourable than ever, and I am confused. Maybe I just got it wrong from the beginning. I had thought since I was teenager that surrealism was about creativity, exploration and subversion, about creating a zone to accumulate experiences of a promising otherness and gathering friendships around it, which is something that would indeed be more urgent now than ever.
It would perhaps seem like most of the alleged surrealist movement today are quite happy either jumping on to every opportunity of exposure or slowly getting assimilated into official collaborations with the forces that we first joined together to oppose, and that the abundant misapplications of the term are changing in many contexts into effective redefinitions of the term surrealism into something that cannot have a core.
But I still would like to think there is one. That the spark of basic creativity would also involve a spark of basic integrity, the realisation that the exploration of the unknown will have to take place according to its own conditions and building its own forums and not as a career path in either of the cultural market segments and cultural instutions in current society.
And just because structures and meeting places are shattered and people feel isolated and either despair or put their faith more in virtual relationships, there is no need to accept that our personal shortcomings and depressions bring the concepts, promises, hopes and spirits down with us in a generalised shipwreck. Surrealism has a couple of times been imagined as an ark, bringing the sense of poetry into the next civilisation. It makes no sense to police the use of the term surrealism (and it is an already lost cause) but we can still claim that there is a core meaning that is what makes it meaningful as a concept at all, and which may make some of the current applications of the word completely irrelevant and uninteresting, while others are partly relevant and even promising, whenever being shifts and historical circumstances move us into a different terrain. (Yes, there will probably be enough cake to wade in, but that’s not the point.)
-Mattias Forshage
(title photo by Jason Abdelhadi)