Posts Tagged ‘Andre Breton’
“The imaginary is what tends to become real”*…
Editorial note: your correspondent will be off the grid tomorrow, so (Roughly) Daily will be in “roughly” mode; “daily” service should begin again on Monday.
Surrealism took a hit in the later 20th century. For instance, Susan Sontag suggested that “surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.” The great designer Milton Glaser averred that “in an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.”
But (in an excerpt from his fascinating new book, Why Surrealism Matters) Mark Polizzotti argues that it’s relevant still…
Does Surrealism still matter? Has it ever mattered? The question is hardly new, and has been debated practically since the movement was launched. Already in 1930, a mere six years after its brash inauguration, the twenty-something poet René Daumal was cautioning André Breton, Surrealism’s founder, primary theorist, and author of the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), against the threat of irrelevance through popular acceptance: “Beware, André Breton, of one day figuring in study guides to literary history; whereas if we aspire to an honor, it is to be inscribed for posterity in the history of cataclysms.” (An apt warning, as Breton and many other Surrealists have since figured in quite a few study guides.)
A dozen years later, Breton himself, in exile in the United States during World War II, fulminated to students at Yale University against the “impatient gravediggers” who declared Surrealism over and done. Given that many of the young men in the audience were thinking about their looming draft notices, we can imagine that they, too, were wondering how relevant Surrealism was to their lives at that moment. And today, as Surrealism marks its centennial, and as its fortunes over the past fifty years have risen, fallen, and risen again, it’s a question worth pondering once more.
Indeed, much like the students at Yale, young people of the twenty-first century could hardly be faulted for wondering what a bunch of eccentric writers and artists showing off their dream states could have to do with such pressing concerns as social and racial injustice, a faltering job market, gross economic inequities, the decimation of our civil liberties, questions of gender identity and equality, environmental devastation, education reform, or, once again as I write this, the specter of world war. All the more so in that the word “surreal” has come to stand, in the popular imagination, for a vague cluster of things, a catchall term that runs the gamut from the unnerving to the merely kooky.
The answer is that Surrealism engaged with all of these crises. To cite several examples: The Surrealists’ outspoken critiques of French colonialism and racism share many points in common with current debates about racial equality and social justice. Their opposition to war and the military, dating as far back as World War I, was echoed in protests against France’s involvement in Algeria and America’s war in Vietnam, among others. The frankness with which they addressed sexuality, though this does not airbrush the more than equivocal position of women in the movement, was audacious for its time, and has had lasting echoes in contemporary attitudes. Their skepticism about work is almost a direct pre-echo of today’s Great Resignation…
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… To my mind, Surrealism’s true legacy is less as a forerunner than as a disruptor, something that perpetually challenges the existing paradigms and seeks new forms to maintain its emotional intensity. Or again, as a code-mixer, which takes in elements of its past, present, and projected future and recombines them, reworks them, reimagines them into something new, and then something newer…
One of Surrealism’s main drivers was a refusal of the values that European society tried to force on them. As political beings, they abhorred the bellicose jingoism that came screeching to the forefront during the War of 1914-18, and they felt revulsion not only toward the war itself but also toward the societal status quo that had fostered it, as well as the economic disparities, blatant racism, and intellectual blandness that went with it.
As writers and artists, they repudiated—at least in theory—the careerism and complacency that underscored so much literature and art, and that led to creative stagnation, not to say to a tacit or overt endorsement of the crumbling social contract. By nature, Surrealist works are animated by an emphatic dissociation from the reigning orthodoxy, whether political, societal, or aesthetic…
… the aspect of Surrealism that to me epitomizes why it continues to resonate through changing trends and urgencies is its unwavering belief that the marvels it sought were a force for universal emancipation, within everyone’s reach. The aim was to tap into previously unsuspected resources and unleash the potential we all possess for wonder, invention, and salutary rage.
Otherwise put, Surrealism’s importance lies not so much in the works it produced as in the attitudes underlying them. Those who equate the movement with names such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Paul Eluard, and Robert Desnos might find this surprising. But though Surrealism is now generally considered a movement in literature and the arts, and while its principal members indeed used artistic means, their initial impulses were mainly philosophical, political, and experimental.
Breton, a former medical student who had studied neurology and psychiatry, defined it with scientific tonalities as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express… the actual functioning of thought.” Surrealism in its essence tends not toward aesthetics but toward a radical new means of seeing the world, even a set of ethical guideposts…
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More than any other intellectual current of modern times, Surrealism posited a world that could embrace, equally and indivisibly, the violence of rebellion and the passion of creation. This book aims to parse out what is living and what is dead in Surrealist ideas, what is vibrant and what stale; to evaluate why, and whether, the revolution that Surrealism sought to foment can still claim the qualifier, as one of its tracts put it nearly a century ago, of “first and always.”
The legacy of one of the 20th century’s most innovative artistic movements: “Permanent Newness: Surrealism at 100,” in @lithub.
* André Breton
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As we wrestle with reality, we might send dream-like birthday greetings to David Lynch; he was born on this date in 1946. A filmmaker, painter, visual artist, musician, and actor, he is best known for his films– Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006)– and for the series Twin Peaks (co-created and co-written with Mark Frost).
Critic Pauline Kael labeled him “the first populist surrealist.”
Bonus: “I Found David Lynch’s Lost Dune II Script.”
“Why should things be easy to understand?”*…
The universe is kind of an impossible object. It has an inside but no outside; it’s a one-sided coin. This Möbius architecture presents a unique challenge for cosmologists, who find themselves in the awkward position of being stuck inside the very system they’re trying to comprehend.
It’s a situation that Lee Smolin has been thinking about for most of his career. A physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Smolin works at the knotty intersection of quantum mechanics, relativity and cosmology. Don’t let his soft voice and quiet demeanor fool you — he’s known as a rebellious thinker and has always followed his own path. In the 1960s Smolin dropped out of high school, played in a rock band called Ideoplastos, and published an underground newspaper. Wanting to build geodesic domes like R. Buckminster Fuller, Smolin taught himself advanced mathematics — the same kind of math, it turned out, that you need to play with Einstein’s equations of general relativity. The moment he realized this was the moment he became a physicist. He studied at Harvard University and took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, eventually becoming a founding faculty member at the Perimeter Institute.
“Perimeter,” in fact, is the perfect word to describe Smolin’s place near the boundary of mainstream physics. When most physicists dived headfirst into string theory, Smolin played a key role in working out the competing theory of loop quantum gravity. When most physicists said that the laws of physics are immutable, he said they evolve according to a kind of cosmic Darwinism. When most physicists said that time is an illusion, Smolin insisted that it’s real.
Smolin often finds himself inspired by conversations with biologists, economists, sculptors, playwrights, musicians and political theorists. But he finds his biggest inspiration, perhaps, in philosophy — particularly in the work of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, active in the 17th and 18th centuries, who along with Isaac Newton invented calculus. Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no “stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” a kind of atom of reality, with each monad representing a unique view of the whole universe. It’s a concept that informs Smolin’s latest work as he attempts to build reality out of viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe. A universe as seen from the inside…
Lee Smolin explains his radical idea for how to understand an object with no exterior–imagine it built bit-by-bit from relationships between events: “How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It.”
* Thomas Pynchon
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As we muse on monads, we might send delightful birthday greetings to Fernando Arrabal Terán; he was born on this date in 1932. A playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist, and poet, Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor (inspired by the god Pan).
Early in his career, he spent three years as a member of André Breton’s surrealist group and was a friend of Andy Warhol and Tristan Tzara. Later (in 1990), he was elected Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de ‘pataphysique (following such predecessors as Marcel Duchamp, Eugène Ionesco, Man Ray, Boris Vian, Dario Fo, Umberto Eco, and Jean Baudrillard).
And throughout, he was very productive: Arrabal has directed seven full-length feature films and has published over 100 plays; 14 novels; 800 poetry collections, chapbooks, and artists’ books; several essays; and his notorious “Letter to General Franco” during the dictator’s lifetime. His complete plays have been published, in multiple languages, in a two-volume edition totaling over two thousand pages. The New York Times‘ theater critic Mel Gussow has called Arrabal the last survivor among the “three avatars of modernism.”
“If gold rusts, what then can iron do?”*…
Austrian designer Klemens Schillinger has created a series of rings that are sized to show the fluctuating price of gold over the past five decades.
Assay the results here and here.
* Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
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As we think twice about all that glitters, we might recall that it was on this date in 1924– four days before the publication of André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto— that The Bureau of Surrealist Research, AKA the Centrale Surréaliste or “Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries,” opened in Paris under the direction of Antonin Artaud. Located at 15 Rue de Grenelle, it was home to a loosely affiliated group of Surrealist writers and artists met, held discussions, and conducted interviews in order to “gather all the information possible related to forms that might express the unconscious activity of the mind.”
Bureau member Man Ray’s photograph of attendees at a 1924 Bureau meeting
Preparing a meal that C.P. Snow would have enjoyed…
When Ferran Adrià, the Spanish maestro who is undisputedly the most influential chef of the last two decades, gave up cooking at his restaurant El Bulli, he announced that he was going to be starting a number of projects. One of them is intended to be a foundation dedicated to the study of himself. Another was a collaboration on the subject of food and science with Harvard. I think quite a few people, on first hearing about that, scratched their heads and wondered what a joint venture between the two might be like. On the one hand, seawater sorbet and ampoules of reduced prawn head bouillon (two Adrià signature dishes). On the other, Helen Vendler. Outcome not obvious…
What we outsiders didn’t know is that all undergraduates at Harvard are required to take at least one class in science. As a result, the university offers some courses designed to be appealing to the kinds of student who wouldn’t be studying science unless they had to. Once that’s known, it makes a lot of sense to involve Adrià, who is rock-star famous in the world of food, in a course designed to appeal to the clever and curious and artily-minded young. So here it is: SPU27, an acronym standing for Science of the Physical Universe 27. Spelled out in English, the name of the course is Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science…
Once upon a time, to take a course like SPU27, you had to be young enough and lucky enough in all the relevant ways to get to Harvard. Today, all you need is to be lucky enough to have access to a computer with an internet connection. SPU27 is part of a remarkable experiment in open access university education called EdX, a collaboration between Harvard and MIT, which gives away entire courses, online, for free…
I registered for EdX and sat down in front of SPU27x (which started on 8 October; you can still sign up and do the course in time to get a certificate). My intention was to ‘audit’ it, i.e. do as much of it as I felt like without subjecting myself to anything too obviously worky. Also, the science of cooking is one of my interests, and I was quietly confident that I knew most of it already. That turned out not to be the case. Looking at the review materials before starting the course, I found myself trying to remember how to calculate the volume of a sphere – it’s (4/3)πr3, in case you too have forgotten – and crunching logarithms in an attempt to answer e3.5=x (answer, x=33.12, obv).
The lectures are broken up into segments of about ten minutes, followed by multiple choice questions which you can do at your leisure, or not, and submit your answers towards a certificate of completion, or not. (Certificates you have to pay for. Everything else is free.) In the first lecture Adrià showed off a few culinary tricks; the second quickly had us working with Avogadro’s constant to determine the number of molecules in a given amount of matter. Homework involves an experiment to calibrate the accuracy of your oven, and some calculations to ascertain the number of various molecules in a recipe for aubergine with buttermilk sauce. Then there’s a test: ‘Estimate the concentration in mol/L of protein using the fact that the average protein is 300 amino acids long and the average amino acid has a mass of 110 amu.’ Er … I think I’ll phone a friend on that one. All this was by way of working with ‘the equation of the week’, which is how SPU27 is structured: it teaches, both by lecture and by hands-on demonstration, the profound and endlessly satisfying mystery of how mathematics penetrates into matter.
In summary, the course is more rigorous, and more educational, than I’d thought it would be… MOOC’s [Massive Open Online Courses] like this one offer something simpler, and in its way purer: education for its own sake. They are purely educational, in the way that so much education increasingly isn’t, as it goes further and further in the direction of box-ticking and teaching to the test. Although it’s already possible to extract a great deal of use from MOOCs, as in the comp sci example I mentioned, I suspect a lot of the good they bring to the world won’t be in the form of anything useful. Instead they offer anyone who can be bothered the chance to learn things just for the sake of learning. As lifetimes get longer, there’s less need for people to stop learning, and less need for the experience of education to be something confined to ghettos of the young. Avogadro’s constant, which is used to tell you the number of molecules in a given amount of matter, is 6.022 x 1023. Isn’t that cool? And now I’m off to calibrate my oven by observing the melting point of sugar. I see in the course notes that the full protocol for doing that comes from a book called Cooking for Geeks.
Read the whole piece at the London Review of Books. And learn to cook in a way that bridges C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”— sign up for the course here.
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As we wear our lab coats into the kitchen, we might send surprising birthday greetings to Rene Magritte; he was born on this date in 1898. Magritte made a living as a draftsman and an advertising artist before putting together the paintings (largely impressionist and futurist in style) for his first show in his native Belgium… at which critics heaped abuse on his work. Disheartened, Magritte moved to Paris, and fell in with Andre Breton, who helped him become the integral part of the Surrealist Movement that he became.
“The Son of Man”
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