A Tribe of Vagrants, Ranging from Sessile to Scuttling, Rewriting the Map

Another place is another place. It can’t be denied that there are reasons to move around. Seeing another part of the world is always rewarding in the obvious and classic pedagogic sense of providing an experience of how natural circumstances and people’s habits can be very different elsewhere, the basic experience that normality varies.

But this is quite easily attained, and for the basic epistemologic points you certainly don’t need to keep repeating it over and over again with compulsive travelling or regular annual holiday travelling, which both might in fact start undermining this basic point by making the shift in normalities predictable and normal. Surrealism was always about revealing the unusual and if you will exotic wherever you are, so you certainly don’t need to actually travel to be a surrealist traveller, just open your eyes to the strangeness surrounding you.

Also, of course, current globalisation, just like the still ongoing tourism industry, and the longer running plain old more or less colonial exoticism, all tend to package the experiences of otherness in neat predictable, categorised and quantifiable units. It is technically still possible to be an openminded global vagrant, but it is also very possible to maybe appear like one on a superficial level while actually just following one’s routines in a rather standard everyday-life-under-capitalism mode embellished with quickly changing exotic surroundings which might not even be particularly striking anymore when commercial supply and demography has been, let’s say, “normalised” through “peaceful” economic means.

Quickly looking back on surrealist history from the beginnings up to now, there are some travels that have become part of our shared experience (tradition) more than others, some in the form of frequently retold anecdotes and others as major changes in the conditions of surrealist activity (such as the various cases of exodus during the second world war).

And there is a wide spectrum between those individuals who have stayed their ground and those who keep bustling about. Factors that may push people to the former pole might be, of course, lack of funds, or political circumstances including impossibility to get a travel visa, but it might also be a thorough doubt that there is actually so much more that is meaningfully accessible in a remote spot than just anywhere, including where we already find ourselves. And of course, lack of funds is never an absolute obstacle and historically many of the poorest are also the most nomadic; whereas political circumstances may in fact be a far stronger factor and has indeed shaped the experience of surrealist activity in Czechoslovakia, for example. And there are many ways to travel in one’s chamber, and in the dream realm. While certainly, trees are walkers too, as are famously continents.

Whereas those who travel a lot may do so because they’ve found a spot of affinity where they want to spend a lot of time without being able to cut the ties with the point of origin or of civil obligations, or because they developed a taste for exploration of a kind that easily expresses itself in geographical (spatial, cultural) parameters, or because their profession or other obligations gave them the opportunity to travel and they didn’t feel a strong urge to stay at home, or it might have simply the latter alone, a lack of respect for the sentiments of sedentariness, and the fundamental distrust of home, of the comfort of the familiar, of one’s own ability to arrange a more favourable environment than chance or chaos will provide.

Among the ones to be recognised as notably restless, there is no need to count those travellers who are merely pushed by social, economic or political urges to visit each other, come see exhibitions and events, or find some very good friendships or a partner or a job somewhere else. Sure, this type of travelling is part of the sociogeographical mixing and patterns, and for surrealist activity very important parts of the conveying of experience and a deeper understanding of conditions and experiences of surrealist activities in other cultural settings, but they are not necessarily part of vagrancy, of the spatial exploring obsession, they might just be practical, pleasurable and advantageous. And if they’re not, they could be avoided.

Let’s just refreshen memory and pick up some of the travellers, some of the journeys, and some of the conditions for travelling, that contributed to shaping surrealism’s notion of global space and mobility. It will definitely be just a small selection of aspects and names and many favourites will probably be missing.

Hendrik Cramer may be considered the first surrealist explorer in the more traditional sense of the word, a former navy captain turned poet. But his journeys in the Caribbean are from before he encountered surrealism, and while he kept on travelling, he never did so on behalf of surrealism so to speak.

Jacques Viot became the first surrealist tropical exile, exploring Oceanian cultures in the 20s escaping punishment for a fraud conviction.

Mary Low, whom we might consider the first surrealist rootless internationalist, jumping (with her husband Juan Brea) between sites of insurrection and unrest throughout the 30s (France, Romania, Spain, Czechoslovakia) before settling in Cuba.

In the early period, the more famous surrealists typically travelled mainly within western & central Europe. In the light of surrealism, it was not like walking around the streets of Paris didn’t have enough exotic encounters to offer… The classic experiment in 1924 of taking a train to smalltown Blois and walking back to Paris became famous for being a largely negative experience. Journeys so isolated as to have maybe gained a certain parodic lustre is Eluard’s much publicised “lachez tout”-style running away from home (also in 1924), when he resurfaced in Saigon as soon as he ran out of money, and Leiris’s participation in the classic Dakar-Djibouti expedition across Africa 1931-33 but then stubbornly staying at home after that.

Not unlike Cramer, Swedish poet Harry Martinson was a seaman going around the globe, but before his rather brief involvement with surrealism. And his pal Artur Lundkvist was being sent all over by his publishers, for writing exotic travel reportages from remote shores, and the results are indeed of a rather generalised exoticism which to a degree but not a vast one overlaps with his surrealist concerns. Others had opportunity to find remote locations of selective affinity, like Valentine Penrose in India, in a way that became far more common later.

Artaud’s isolated trips to Mexico 1936 and Ireland 1937 are significant parts of the story, but of course he was since long estranged from organised surrealism at the time. Then Breton went to Mexico too, and while exploring many crucial local or converging contacts and experiences also was quite intoxicated with the whole atmosphere of the part of the world and claimed it as a surrealist country. (This claim was a bit shaky to begin with and has proven easily misunderstood since, but it must be recognised as the other pole of surrealist spatial experience: yes, encounters and discoveries can turn up everywhere if you are vigilant, but it’s also true that there are “heated landscapes” where the unusual, poetically charged, immediately meaningful, and chance-wise dynamical is nevertheless just much more frequent than in others.) More on the generalist side (I would claim) is the important lesson emphasised by Roland Penrose in the title of his scrapbook from his 1938 trip around Balkan with Lee Miller, “The Road is Wider than Long”.

Of the more famous surrealists, perhaps Benjamin Péret’s is the most emblematic case for a surrealist internationalist. Repeatedly relocating between France, Brazil, Spain and Mexico, always without much money, and always tirelessly associating with the local radical political movements as well as the radical artists, and making ambitious deepdives into local mythologies. Whereas many of the French surrealists clearly stayed French exiles wherever they went in the world, Péret seems to display a very different mindset, emphasising universal aspects of poetry and revolt and prestigelessly investigating local contributions wherever he went, equally at home or perhaps equally not at home wherever he went.

But of course, many of the movements we’ve already mentioned now are part of the general turmoil that made people rally to Spain in the 30s and then prompted a lot of people to go on the run during the world war, effectively dispersing surrealism to a number of new locations especially in the western hemisphere. André Breton, Pierre Mabille, Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller, Wolfgang Paalen, Max Ernst, Wifredo Lam, Matta, Gordon Onslow-Ford, and others.

We should acknowledge the obvious fact that the traditional artists educational “grand tour” to Paris was often a long journey from remote parts of the world which contributed to mutual exchange of experience. Others came from peripheral countries as correspondents or on reportage grants for national newspapers or art magazines or commercial publishers or cultural institutions.

Duchamp and Picabia held attitudes of rootlessness high, and even though their actual travelling was largely part of a Dada spatial nivellation, Duchamp kept cultivating notions of “portability”, involving the avoiding of leaving too much tracks, of accumulating property, and getting attached to any sense of home. His invention of conceptual artworks which the later academic artcrowd hailed for all the wrong reasons was a part of this track, just one step ahead beyond his box of miniatures of his collected works. A full-scale oeuvre is just a burden.

But also, again of course, the travelling patterns under colonialism, with colonial administrators (including several surrealists in a civil professional capacity, such as Portuguese in Angola and Belgians in Congo) going one way (occasionally dropping out), and local representatives and relatively privileged students going the other way (including many who joined surrealism, such as in the famous example of the Martiniquans of Légitime défense), later to be followed by migrant workers, dispossessed and refugees (occasionally banding together in exile gangs but more commonly contributing to the rather heterogenous surrealist nexuses without particular circumscriptions). While it became more common during postwar times to have double or multiple homes, and to take part in foreign surrealist groups on the basis of selective affinity and rather regular visits. But still only for some, and still some stand out as surrealist vagrants or spatial explorers.

EF Granell, perhaps the next major internationalist, bringing surrealism to Guatemala and Puerto Rico, en route between Spain, the Dominican Republic, USA, and back to Spain.

Claude Tarnaud, considered a French surrealist but most of the time staying in Switzerland, Somalia or New York.

Jean Benoît, who went to Oceania several times in the 60s to collect artifacts for French museums and collectors (while the main surrealist scholar on such artifacts, Vincent Bounoure, stayed in France), and ”went native” into something that became very acute upon his return to Paris, where he famously managed in part to lead a kind of ”savage” life’.

Christopher Starr, the foreign entomologist, who’s been the movement’s contact point in a series of tropical locations, the Philippines, Taiwan and Trinidad.

Ted Joans is still the emblem of the surrealist internationalist nomad, who would just pop up anywhere in the world and take a selfie with any surrealist group. Of course, working for an airway company made it easier, but he also epitomised the necessary unexpectedness and degree of spatial nivellation while maintaining a high level of curiousness.

Perhaps Johannes Bergmark seems, of those still at it, to be the closest to this mode of popping up just anywhere, happening to have booked a gig there.

Again, many others choose to stay where they are or keep exploring their closer surroundings. And many may be quite experienced travellers and flyers without physically moving. Others again actually did those weird journeys that seemed so odd or dreamlike that they may be widely erroneously perceived as imaginary journeys. Rik Lina repeatedly speaks of the experience of the tropical rainforest and of the underwater worlds of coral reefs which obviously influenced his painting and his general outlook, but you never know when or where it was (or is) that he experienced (or keeps experiencing) this. And there’s the rather widely publicised surrealist experiments in Antarctica published under the name Kristoffer Flammarion. Indeed, while this is obviously quite “cool” in many other respects than the obvious, apparently it is nothing to be bragging about, and it is a place among others with special circumstances that can be used as a background for surrealist experimentation.

Of course, it is not “more surrealist” to either fly off or to stay. Surrealism will have a way of highlighting the exploratory experience regardless of where it is picked up. But clearly, even the local level spatial movement has been recently affected by politically mandated isolation. Some were already rather isolated and just went on with their daily explorations, others were more dramatically grounded. Among those, some found ways of making available substitutes allow for new types of explorations, whereas others perceived it as highly tragic, with various degrees of success in finding ways to cope.

But whereas we can only speculate now as to what extent freedom of movement will be reinstated, for whom, under what circumstances and at what cost, there are two rather obvious longterm consequences of this experience. One is that more people will have discovered ways of exploring their more immediate surroundings and will have questioned the modern ideology of tourism (which is of course also beneficial from the viewpoint of global resources, but hardly enough to counter the unimpeded apocalyptic concernlessness of capitalist economy – and also not the most interesting aspect for surrealism specifically). The other one is that we will have seen far more people join in enthusiastically in a conservative celebration of home and family, and in the eagerness to replace personal exchange with digital substitutes, some to the point of considering public meeting points, gatherings and cultural events, and encounters with strangers, as obsolete and unnecessary altogether. Responsibilities for work circumstances will have further shifted from employers to employees, the family with its control systems and abusive behaviors has had ample opportunity to claim its inescapability, while many persons have had the opportunity to experience a previously unparalleled degree of loneliness.

We must stop there, the very notion of “reinventing travel” was and remains intended to go beyond such whining about the times as well as the nostalgic celebration of travel memories.

Under the new circumstances, how do we best apply the generalised exploratory attitudes of surrealism on the small scale as well as the large scale? How do we make sure to keep bumping into random encounters? How do we make sure to be able to get really intimate with the weird ideas and idiosyncracies of comrades in far off countries? How will we be able to adapt to a new circumscription of practical possibilities, diversifying spatial exploration and yet maintaining a surrealist attitude? How do we make sure to keep wandering? What are the rafts of the new world? What are the noneuclidic tunnels still to be revealed? How do our notions of space, distance, time and scale practically affect our real material reach?

This issue does of course not provide a definitive answer, but quite a bouquet of suggestions to work on.