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"Only
that which is an object of freedom can be called an idea."
-Hegel
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Leopard
Frog (1/5) |
"A
flash bridegs the gap between inner and outer, causing
a momentary fusion and wholeness. Thus poetry starts."
-Jean Toomer
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Porcupine
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Edited
with introductions and Notes by
FRANKLIN ROSEMONT,PENELOPE ROSEMONT
&PAUL GARON
Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997
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SURREALISM:
THE CHICAGO IDEA
Excerpts from the Introduction to The Forecast Is Hot!
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Surrealism as an organized movement originated in Paris in the last
months of World War I. The first surrealist work properly so-called,
The Magnetic Fields, by André Breton and Philippe
Soupault, appeared in 1919. Breton, the movement's principal theorist,
published the first Surrealist Manifesto in October 1924.
The Bureau of Surrealist Research opened its doors at 15 Rue de
Grenelle that same month, and the first issue of La Révolution
surréaliste appeared in December. The first title published
under the "Editions surréalistes" imprint was issued
in January 1925, and in March of '26 the Surrealist Gallery opened
at 16 Rue Jacques Callot. Absolute revolt, a no-compromise defense
of the Marvelous, and a new, unsettling kind of humor that Breton
later characterized as black: Such were the hallmarks of
the "new vice" that aimed at nothing less than the "total
liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it."
That
this revolution-in-the-making responded to far more than regional
exigencies is indicated by the rapid rise of surrealist groups all
over the world. That it was not limited to the immediate post-World-War-I
years, or even to the period between the two wars, is further demonstrated
by the continuous, uninterrupted development of the movement up
to the present.
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Always much more than a mere "ism," exceeding the conventional
boundaries of art, literature, philosophy and science, surrealism
is truly epochal in scope, historically comparable not to any
local or transient "school" but rather to such far-ranging
and self-renewing currents as alchemy, romanticism, utopianism and
anarchismcurrents resistant to tight definition, which have
stubbornly defied the geographical and chronological limits assigned
to them by critics and historians, and which have a way of turning
up in new forms and new places when and where no one is looking for
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As
the revolutionary negation not only of advanced capitalism but of
the entire repressive megamachine of Western Civilization, surrealism's
revolution has proved to be permanent embarassingly
so for the buyers and sellers of stock in the pollutocratic culture
industry. Today more than ever apologists for all forms of existing
misery are desperately eager to contain subversive thought and action
in their obfuscatory categories. Although their hyper-hypocrisy
is as obvious as the absence of real news on TV, their wishful thinking
that surrealism, anarchism, communism, and even mass uprisings are
"only history" is nonetheless perfectly sincere. Trapped
in an ideological theme-park as large and labyrinthine as the megalomania
and greed of the exploiting class, those who speak of surrealism
only in the past tense are simply doing their best to console their
masters and hoodwink the people.
Banned in Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Hirohito's
Japan, Mao's China and numerous other dictatorships, surrealism
in the increasingly totalitarian bourgeois "democracies"
has been by turns ignored, ridiculed, denounced, and at all times
falsified in the mainstream press. In the 1980s anti-surrealism
became a growth industry. Hostility to living surrealism (often
combined with hypocritical homages to the deceased) is a characteristic
prerequisite of every repressive ideology in the era of hi-tech
prisons, smile-face genocide and postmodern cyberfacism.
Surrealism
remains the best-hated and most-lied-about "cultural"
movement of our time. Is it surprising that it has been hated most,
and lied about most, in the most advanced capitalist society?
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Surrealism as an indigenous collective endeavor started late in
the U.S. Typically, "experts" had been pronouncing it
dead for more than three decades before it came to life on these
shores. In the 1920s and '30s surrealism extended to dozens of countriesto
the Iberian peninsula, Greece, Belgium, England and all over eastern
Europe as well as to Argentina, Egypt, Martinique and Japanbut
did not take root in the U.S. Several Americans had dabbled in Dadaism,
but only oneMan Rayjoined his Parisian friends in forming
the more subversive movement that succeeded it, and he did so as
an expatriate. Later, when the Nazi occupation of France forced
André Breton and other surrealists into several years' exile
in New York, a few Americans were attracted to the movement and
took part in an International Surrealist Exhibition as well as the
journal VVV. For most of the Americans, howeverincluding
painter Robert Motherwell, sculptor David Hare and critics Lionel
Abel and Harold Rosenbergsurrealism was but a moment's youthful
transgression in their careers, and hardly a trace of it remained
in the work that made them famous in the Fifties. Fundamentally,
the group around Breton in New York in the 1940s consisted of European
refugees; even their meetings were conducted in French. The few
exceptions, the handful of Americans for whom surrealism and its
emancipatory ideals truly mattered, tended to be loners who left
the city when Breton and his friends returned to Europe. Significantly,
the most notable among themClarence John Laughlin, Gerome
Kamrowski, Philip Lamantialater took part in the activity
of the Chicago Surrealist Group.
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Exemplifying
the historic continuity of the international surrealist movement
today, the Chicago Surrealist Group is not only the outcome of a
long, cultural/political development in the U.S., but also a direct,
organic offshoot of the original Surrealist Group formed in Paris
in the 1920s. Two founders of the Chicago group, Franklin and Penelope
Rosemont, had gone to Paris in 1965 to meet André Breton,
and took part for several months in the daily reunions of the Paris
group at the café Promenade de Vénus. The situation
of surrealism in the U.S., and the perspectives and prospects of
a group in Chicago were frequent topics of discussion at these meetings
and in informal gatherings with individuals between meetings. The
Surrealist Group organized in Chicago in July '66 enjoyed the warm
encouragement and support of André Breton and the entire
Surrealist Group in France, as is movingly demonstrated by the collective
letters they sent, published here as Appendices. In the first of
these communications, which carried the significant dateline, "1
May 1967, 81st Anniversary of the Chicago workers' uprising,"
the Paris group expressed its "wholehearted affection"
for, and "total agreement" with, the Chicagoans.
As
our first publications began to circulate, letters arrived from
other countries, with much the same content and tone. Georges Gronier
in Brussels, Vratislav Effenberger in Prague, Her de Vries in Amsterdam,
Aldo Pellegrini in Buenos Aires, Steen Colding in Copenhagen, Shuzo
Takiguchi in Tokyo, Conroy Maddox in London, Mario Cesariny and
Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas in Lisbonthat is, the principal spokespersons
for surrealism throughout the world at that timewelcomed the
advent of the Chicago Surrealist Group as a particularly important
development for the movement as a whole. Writing on behalf of the
Paris group, Gérard Legrandfrequently described as
"Breton's right-hand man"wrote on 22 June '67: "We
assure you of our passionate support for your venture. The perspectives
it offers, as much for yourselves as on the international scale,
are the most appealing that have been drawn up for surrealism in
a long time."
In a matter of months, Chicago had become a key place on the world
surrealist map.
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Surrealism
remains an international movement, resistant to all national
and regional chauvinism. Each country, however, imposes certain
cultural and political conditions that inevitably affect surrealism's
course of development within it. Like surrealism in Prague, Paris,
Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Stockholm, London, Leeds, Australia and
Puerto Ricoto mention only places where surrealist groups
are active todaysurrealism in Chicago has certain distinguishing
qualities: experiences and emphases that give it a character of
its own. Paradoxical though it may seem, the autonomy and diversity
of surrealism's particular local manifestations are the sine
qua non of the global movement's universal unity and coherence.
Here are some of the key elements of "Chicago Idea" surrealism:
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