The quality of the ideas isn’t of much concern. “In a session lasting a set duration (ten minutes to an hour), a limited number of people (6 to 15) have complete freedom to express as many of their ideas as possible, no matter how outlandish, with no risk of censure. In “France-Observateur”, Gérard Lauzun writes: Nothing, however, constitutes such a clear co-opting of Surrealism’s subversive discoveries as the exploitation of automatic writing, and the collective games based on it, found in the technique of canvassing ideas called “brainstorming” in the United States. The use of tape recorders to teach sleeping subjects sets about depleting life’s storehouse of dreams in the pursuit of pathetic and repugnant utilitarian goals. , everything that constituted a margin of freedom for Surrealism finds itself co-opted and utilised by the repressive world the Surrealists had fought. However the reality controlling this progression is that, the revolution has not come 4 Demonstrations of innovation in the disciplines which are genuinely advancing (the scientific techniques) take on a Surrealist appearance: in 1955, a robot at the University of Manchester wrote a love letter that could pass for an example of automatic writing by a less-than-talented 3 The modern world has caught up with the clear lead that Surrealism once had on it. Thus, for the most part, the pictorial novelties which have attracted attention since the end of the war are merely details, isolated and enlarged, taken - secretly - from the coherent mass of Surrealist contributions (Max Ernst, at an exhibition in Paris in early 1958, recalled what he had heard from Pollock in 1942). All those who want to place themselves after Surrealism rediscover questions which predate it (Dadaist poetry or theatre – research into a collection of secondhand goods 2 beyond the Surrealist postscript to art history – in the issues of constructing an authentic life. Surrealism has an impassable nature in the conditions of life it has encountered (and which it has scandalously prolonged until now) because, as a whole, it is already an addendum to the art and poetry annihilated by Dadaism, with all the possibilities 1 Meanwhile, the intensifying delay in mass action devoted to this overthrow, along with the contradictions of advanced capitalism and a matching impotence in cultural creation, maintain the currency of Surrealism and promote a multiplicity of degraded repetitions. This success has backfired on Surrealism, which expected nothing less than the overthrow of the dominant social order. Report on the Construction of Situations, June 1957įramed within a world that has not been fundamentally transformed, Surrealism is a success. "The success of Surrealism owes much to the fact that the most modern aspect of this society’s ideology has renounced a strict hierarchy of artificial values and openly makes use of the irrational, alongside the relics of Surrealism." Proofread and Edited by Anna O’Meara & Mehdi el H. Translated by Ian Thompson, January 2015. The lavish nature of all this surrealist abuse leads one to think that either the libel laws must be rather lenient in France or else that the magazine did not circulate very widely among the 540 insultees.”įrom “Asger Jorn - The Crucial Years 1954-1964” Political invective also has its scale, from the simple to the more complex, starting with ‘argumentist’, ‘confusionist’, ‘integrationist’, ‘reformist’, ‘Trotskyist’ and proceeding to more sophisticated aberrations such as ‘anarcho- Maoist’, ‘anti-Boumediennist’, ‘Bourguibist’, ‘sub-Leninist’, ‘stalino- surrealist’.Īt the very top there are maledictions which reach poetic heights: ‘coagulated undertaker’s mute’, ‘monogamous police hound’. ![]() Next comes a more precise group of epithets: ‘anti-Semite’, ‘deist’, ‘lapassadist’, ‘mentally deficient Buddhist’, ‘militarist’, ‘mythomaniac’, ‘necrophage’, ‘plagiarist’, ‘royalist’. At the bottom of the scale are the routine expressions of disapproval which come most easily to hand: ‘braggart’, ‘cheat’, ‘cretin’, ‘hypocrite’, ‘idiot’, ‘impostor’, ‘liar’, ‘mafioso’, ‘nonentity’, ‘pimp’, ‘scoundrel’, ‘traitor’, ‘upstart’. They number 540, but Raspaud and Voyer add the consoling statistic that a further 400 persons were mentioned in the magazine without insult. ![]() “As an interesting corollary to the many purges, Raspaud and Voyer have compiled an index of those who were insulted in the pages of IS.
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