Les Chants de Maldoror

Isidore Ducasse, better known in the literary world under the pseudonym Comte de Lautreamont, published in 1869 a strange book in six parts entitled, Les Chants de Maldoror. He became known as the forefather of surrealism after Philippe Soupault and André Breton had his work republished, impassioned by the work.

The surrealists, in general, embraced him. Magritte and Dali both produced illustrated text. Besides his cover for the work, I have included one of Magritte's illustrations that is reminiscent of a scene in the second song in which the narrator explains he was deaf until one day looking up at the sky, and then looking even higher, he saw a throne made of human excrement and gold on which sat a proud body, covered in a dirty hospital shroud, called The Creator, who held in his hand the trunk of a body which he brought to his eyes, then nose, then mouth. At which point you can well imagine that he did devour the flesh. His feet dipped in a boiling sea of blood from which humans bobbed up for air before sinking immediately. One body digested, he would plunge his hand around the neck of another and eating the head first, then the legs and arms, occasionally cry out: "I created you; thus do I have the right to do with you what I want. You have done nothing to me, I do not suggest to the contrary. I make you suffer, and that for my pleasure". In response to this sight, the young deaf boy lets out a piercing scream, the first sound he ever hears.

The book is known for its depiction of cruelty and evil. There are some scenes that are truly horrendous, à la Sade but without the fixation on sex, with the ability to be cruel across the terrain of the mind and flesh. These moments are so well described, some characters seem so easy to envision, that it is not terribly surprising that artists would want to sketch out their own images for these bizarre 'songs'.

Dali's imagination easily transferred. In 1933, Albert Skira who had already published Ovid's Metamorphoses illustrated by Picasso and some poems of Mallarmé illustrated by Matisse, requested that Dali provide engravings for this text that was so important to the surrealists. Dali had been recommended by Picasso, who was then producing the cover for the first issue of the surrealist journal Minotaure, being published by Skira. Though Dali was involved in the journal from its first issue, he would only produce a cover for the eighth issue, which was financed by the Englishman Edward James whose patronage supported the Dalis in 1936. Magritte, also occasionally supported by James, would produce 77 illustrations for a 1948 edition of the text published in Belgium.

Though Les Chants are boringly dark (as anyone who has read Sade will understand), they have moments for anyone of interest. The surrealists were particularly taken with it because the author was such a mystery, little known of him and dying suddenly, buried quickly and then moved to another location. Though Ducasse published this text anonymously and at his own cost, he began writing a second book, of which we only have the first two sections Poems I and Poems II, which was to:

replace melancoly with courage, doubt with certainty, desperation with hope, complaints with responsibility, skepticism with faith, sophistry with cold calm, and pride with modesty. 

Artist Manifesto

A compilation of manifestos specific to artistic movements of the 20th century was recently released, edited by Alex Danchev entitled 100 Artists' Manifestos. Manifestos are a delight to read, so I often do. I often talk about them to my friends. Sometimes I even talk about them at conferences.

This compilation claims to go "from the Futurists to the Stuckists" and specifically only looks at manifestos relevant to art. The compilation edited by Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms, is still unsurpassed, but that remains due to its broader coverage. It does, however, end before including the Stuckists, whose rhetoric is well worth reading if you enjoy, as I do, the audacity that permits referring to Sartre as a 'toss-pot'. If you wish to focus on what artists had to say about their medium, the Danchev book might be the one for you–though you would miss out on lots of other deliciously juicy manifestos from fiends and friends of art.

Not that you would necessarily understand any of that from Terry Eagleton's review in the March 25th Times Literary Supplement. He assumes that the title of the compilation says it all, which granted largely it does, and promptly moves on to his own issues and problems with the fall out of the revolutionary avant-garde–as it is called, as if the avant-garde were ever not revolutionary...but that is for another discussion. I rather like it when reviewers decide to riff on the topic of the book, or use it to expound their own ideas, largely because such an attitude forces them to be more polemical than they might be inclined towards if their intention were to produce a straightforward report on the text.

At any rate, after much discussion of the ultra-leftism of most manifestos, their performative value, he reminds his readers that the avant-garde art between the two wars was not a simple group of clowns but a real threat to the state regimes run by two of the worst ideologues of that century: Stalin and Hitler. He concludes eloquently. These art movements have progresses and been incorporated into our daily lives to a point that was not at all what these original revolutionaries had in mind:

Post-modern culture is, among other things, a sick joke at the expense of the tradition recorded in this collection. Art has indeed been integrated with every day life; but this has happened in the form of advertising, public relations, the media, political speculators, the catwalk and the commodity, which is not quite what the Futurists and Surrealists had in mind.

Aesthetic Surrealism?

I am struggling to understand how surrealism is an aesthetic movement. In looking at Breton's manifestos, I see him advocating awareness, a heightened awareness that flies above and beyond the immediate reality. He may not be writing theories, but he is suggesting a practice that is not so much aesthetic as, if not philosophical (though his encyclopedia definition in the manifesto of 1924 considers it such), psycho-developmental–I hesitate here to say psycho-analytical or psychological.

Automatic writing is not an aesthetic practice but rather a means of glimpsing a self that is truer than the social constructs permit one to see. By revealing the unconscious attitude, the 'real' person is made present, even if that 'reality' appears as a sur-reality. In addition, despite Breton's writings on art, and the general public memory now preferring surrealist art over the writings, Breton does not address the arts. That he addresses writing seems even, if I may, entirely selfish and only in response to his own interest in writing. He may mention writing but he does not mention painting, photography, film, collage, theatre, dance or any other conceivable art. Had he been interested in gardening, one can imagine he would have founded a method of spontaneous gardening. I am facetious here but only to make the point that I struggle to eliminate in my own mind: the writing manner he presents is not because he has an artistic revolution that he wishes to establish, but rather that it is the way he can discuss the personal revolution he is advocating.

In this, I can not help but see him politically active on behalf of the individual. That there can not be a political party is precisely because the cause is each one's. Later in 1934 when he writes Qu'est-ce que le surréalisme, he even says that surrealism is a response to the effects of war, the exhaustion of defeat coming out of war-whether the war is won or not. Liberty in the 1924 manifesto, a lack on interest in art or anti art, philosophy or anti-philosophy in the 1929 manifesto, both suggest that the quest is not aesthetic but personal, where the personal then becomes political.

Hence his manifesto with Trotsky, Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant, on how to maintain the independence of artists and thinkers. Breton seems to have classed anyone interested in the self as an artist, with the assumption that the workers have neither the time nor the disposition. That Breton, and the surrealism he promotes, is in conflict with communism is clear, but I don't understand it as conflict between aesthetics and politics, so much as between the individual and the group. (To the degree that as the years go by, in his writing on art, Breton produces aesthetic doctrines, they seem mostly to be responding to abstract expressionism and why surrealism must have identifiable forms placed in chance encounters.)

I am working on this and suspect to say more....

The Ariadne Myth

The issues in mythology seem even more prominent, however, when one looks at de Chirico’s early paintings which so influenced the Surrealists, even if de Chirico was not himself a member of the group and his later works vociferously denied. The Ariadne series, though so generally termed only in the beginning of the 20th Century with the show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the forty odd pieces de Chirico produced in 1913-1917, in particular points to a subterranean mythic base in surrealism.

This series of paintings are suggestive of the story in which Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus on Naxos after helping him kill the Minotaur and escape the Labyrinth, figures of the myth which would both return in surrealism as prominent journals. This myth is of particular interest because of the undetermined ending. In one account, she weeps for Theseus until she dies. In another account, she is married to Dionysus and made an eternal figure.

To consider some details of this myth: Ariadne is an epithet for Aphrodite, meaning the holy one, who is in the geneology of Greek mythology the first of the Olympians after Zeus castrates his father Kronos, a clear personification of Eros, the abstraction that is first to appear when Chaos is sundered. This places Love, not in its Romanticized sense, but in its wholistic sense of Union, at the foundation and returns us to Breton who would insist on the importance of Love. Staying with the Greek myth a moment longer to address Dionysus, we can see how passion and immediacy play into surrealism. Dionysus is generally known as the god of wine, but he governed all things liquid and living, such as wine, but also the sap of trees, semen and blood. This then is Breton’s Mad Love. In the de Chirico series, Ariadne is frozen in time, a marble statue in a yellow piazza with a column way on one side, a tower looming, a ship and a train in the distance. She seems to wait between her two fates, neither chosen yet.

Her two fates depict the strange mythic split within surrealism, as presented in the different statements on myth of Breton and Bataille. Breton advocated a new mythology, a new lifepath with a new lover. Bataille, on other hand, claimed an absence of myth, in which its very absence was necessary to the realization of a new and thus entirely different ritualization of life in which a mythology would eventually assert itself. In either of these choices, political speech in Barthes’ meaning is invoked to declare a new language, new myth. As Barthes recognizes, all political speech if it succeeds must become myth speech, something seemingly recognized and even permitted by both Breton and Bataille’s arguments. Either way, surrealism as it is here described seems inherently and actively political, definitely engagé.

Le Merveilleux

The holidays frighten me with the potential for things going awry. This year, however, I have someone in my life who is just too marvelous for words. I finally begin to understand Breton's tenet of "le merveilleux" and how on earth it relates to beauty or love.

To introduce a surrealist ethos without discussing the marvelous is impossible, and yet because Breton develops the idea across his essays and reveals the experience of it in his fictions, a simple summary seems particularly shallow. This may be said of many surrealist conceits but the marvelous is particularly prone to being confused with the fantastic or to sounding like over-intellectualized sentimentality.

There is a history of literature of the fantastic that is different from Breton’s expression the marvelous. The fantastic is usually associated with science fiction and attempts to incorporate the alien into the rational world. The marvelous on the other hand is, as Hal Foster puts it in his work Compulsive Beauty, disruptive. Louis Aragon perhaps explains it best in Paris Peasant by stating "the marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real."

“Le merveilleux est toujours beau, n’importe quel merveilleux est beau, il n’y a même que le merveilleux qui soit beau”. This memorable line from the first Manifesto is repeated often and everywhere. The statement is expressive only in the context in which it is presented, otherwise the statement seems like sophomoric over-glorification of either the marvelous or the beautiful. Breton explains in the manifesto how alive the marvelous is. It imbues works with energy and gives them life. Works are marvelous that sustain the moment of surprise and this experience is what is truly beautiful.

The marvelous lives and grows in some Hegelian unfurling. “Le merveilleux n’est pas le même à toutes les époques ; il participe obscurément d’une sorte de révèlation générale dont le détail seul nous parvient: ce sont les ruines romantiques, le mannequin moderne ou tout autre symbole propre à remuer la sensibilité humaine durant un temps” (The marvelous is not the same in all ages; it participates obscurely in a sort of general revelation, in which the details only remain: they are the romantic's ruins, the modern mannequin and all other symbols adequate to shaking human sensibility during a particular time). The marvelous performs in different manners at different times but continues to reveal even if only a few details are captured in the imagination of a culture. Artists present the marvelous through their works and this alters their viewers, rattling the nervous system of one person at a time with the goal of altering the society. The marvelous is progressive both in time and effect on society.

The marvelous in my case is changing the way I think about the holidays, changing the way I think about myself in love, all of which really is just too marvelous for words.

Love in Surrealism

In his 1939 writing on Masson, in Le Surrealisme et la peinture, Breton reiterates his strong sense of the significance of love by believing “que l’art, avant tout, doit être amour plutôt que colère ou pitié”. Art must be love, not in the sense of adoration, but rather as a path towards collectivity. In L’Amour fou, Breton explains how when a man loves, he cannot help but engage with “la sensibilité de tous les hommes” and that in order to do them justice, he must delve into the very depths of their way of being. Love brings man into contact with another and creates an interest in partaking of another worldview.

In the Surrealist Dictionary, the definition for “amour” includes the quote from L’Immaculée Conception that reciprocal love is that which “met en jeu l’inhabitude dans la pratique, l’imagination dans le poncif, la foi dans la doute, la perception de l’objet intérieure dans l’objet extérieure”. Love then creates this charged space where contraries can co-exist. Neither the imagination nor thinking is dominant.

Revolutionary Independent Artist-some thoughts on the Manifesto

Breton alienated the communists and revoked the surreality of many artists because of their ties to communism, but believed in the revolution sufficiently to produce the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art in 1938. This document signed by Breton and Diego Rivera, was in fact a collaboration between Breton and Trotsky. In the document they are trying to address how artists can participate in the communist revolution without losing the independence necessary to being artists. Though Breton had alluded to the need for artists to express their own personal, inner vision, this document affirms that freedom while also stating the role artists play in society.

True art–art that does not merely produce variations on ready-made models but strives to express the inner needs of man and of mankind as they are today–cannot be anything other than revolutionary: it must aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society, if only to free intellectual creation from the chains that bind it and to allow all mankind to climb those heights that only isolated geniuses have reached in the past.

The freedom of intellectual creation that they advocate aligns itself with Breton’s stated aims for Surrealism. The artist must produce images that are not bound by the previous language of art but rather uncover, in those image or others, new visions. In order to alter the established landscape, each artist must be free to present an inner truth. The individual artist by expressing a truly personal vision touches on a more general human experience. In 1947, Breton would explain the rapport between the individual and general history in his remarks on Matta by suggesting that there is a connecting light “entre la causalité universelle et la finalité humaine”. The Hegelian influence of the world on the individual is clear but the individual artist remains central to the success of this endeavor to change the global.

Permitting art to be influenced by a political viewpoint or any aesthetic demands limits the possibilities of creation. Breton and Trotsky state that “art cannot, therefore, without demeaning itself, willingly submit to any outside directive and ensconce itself obediently within the limits that some people, with extremely shortsighted pragmatic ends in view, think they can set on its activities”. Despite their own revolutionary hopes, they recognize that art must be permitted to discuss issues beyond the desires of political or cultural ideologues. Art is a means of discovering knowledge and it can not be subsumed to the needs of those in power without being reduced to pre-conceived, formulaic aphorisms.

The revolution, they claimed, must "from the very beginning, when it comes to intellectual creativity, establish an anarchist system based on individual freedom". Of course Breton with Diego Rivera and Trotsky acknowledge that their ideas about the role of art at the moment, to help prepare and advocate for the revolution, must center on ensuring the revolution. The joy in the manifesto is its attempt to maintain an open door on behalf of art, in the belief that “fairly divergent aesthetic, philosophical, and political orientation [can] meet on this ground”. In order for the artist to present a unique vision, the artist must be permitted and recognized as truly independent. Or so they hoped...

Trotsky was murdered. The revolution wound up becoming an ideological dictatorship. Artists, whose freedom was curtailed under the communist regime of Eastern Europse, provided the dissension that helped destroy the communist tyranny. It is the artists today in Eastern Europe who seem to be producing a link between those who did not suffer the economic destruction of communism and those who did.

The artist should be able to respond to the political or social situation from any point of view, not only that which supports it, or that which acknowledges it. Is that independence? The best we can offer because the only one available.

Art in Surrealism

The role of the visual arts in surrealism came under discussion with the publication of La Revolution Surréaliste. Max Morise in the first issue of La Revolution Surréaliste attempted an explanation of the surrealist method in the field of visual art. He recognizes how Breton, in Les Champs Magnetiques, has established automatic writing that through its practice as well as its final product presents a surreal method. Dismissing a stream of thought, or dreams, as insufficiently particular to Surrealism, he compares the surrealist painter’s brush to a cheetah leaping after its prey and lands on the idea of “certain meetings, apparently fortuitous” which is so clearly tied to the ideas of surrealist writing.

His essay, however, inspired a response by Pierre Naville in the third issue of La Revolution Surrealiste which would declare that there is no such thing as surrealist painting. Breton responds with a series of articles over the next five issues (no. 4, July 15, 1925; no. 6, March 1, 1926; no. 7, June 15, 1926; no. 9-10, October 1, 1927) in which he considered how to discuss Surrealism and painting. These essays become the single long essay “Surréalisme et la peinture” which is now published under that title along with many of his other writings on art and artists.

Early in his essay “Surréalisme et la peinture” Breton discusses why he becomes interested in the language of art. Visual images constitute a language that is no less artificial and whose origins are no less problematic than verbal language. Nonetheless, he intends to consider the state of this language as it is currently, just as he has done with poetry.
“Le besoin de fixer les images visuelles, ces images préexistant ou non à leur fixation, s’est extériorisé de tout temps et a abouti à la formation d’un veritable langage qui ne me paraît pas plus artificiel que l’autre et sur l’origine duquel il serait vain que je m’attarde. Tout au plus me dois-je de considérer l’état actuel de ce langage, de même que l’état actuel du langage poétique, et de rappeler s’il est nécessaire à sa raison d’être”.

The goal in this particular case, however, is to address the stagnant language of art and question the established symbols that have been used in painting. The essay presents modern painters who are seeking new images from their own imagination by which to break with convention, thereby permitting the disrupting effect of the marvelous.

Theory and Reality in Art

In theory, you could look at art and like it or not. Actually in theory you do nothing of the sort. Theory posits all sorts of conceptual pathways and constraints to how we engage with art. Sometimes, I go to an exhibit and the theory postulated behind the work seems utterly ridiculous. Sometimes, theory seems to be all the work has going for it. And sometimes, some very rare and gifted artists manage to produce work that is totally wonderful and has a theoretical conceit–I am thinking here of Cy Twombly, whose work I am currently particularly engaged.

One of the recurring issues is the degree to which art relates to reality. Is it an analysis, presentation, insight into the current state of things? Should it be? I could start with Plato, discuss Hegel, mention Ruskin, all of which I may do as I continue to circle around this issue but for now, as I am reading Breton this fall, I will talk about his take on Tanguy.

Despite Breton’s approach to art as being engaged in a meaning full dialogue, in a 1942 essay on Tanguy, Breton distances theory from the creative production process. Tanguy's works are excellent and are entirely intuitive. Their relationship to theory can only be identified a posteriori, he claims. Theory and creative works may be swimming the same channel but they are coming from two different sources. Theory, in particular psychoanalysis and Gestalt theory for Breton, posits the same quest to recognize the Mother, that is the darkness of the origin, the womb, the cosmos and the conscious that Surrealist art attempts to present through their own efforts (think here of Goethe on the Mother).

Dali famously wore a diving suit, at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibit in London, to represent the way that he plumbs the depths of the unconscious. Though the images that the artists offer may not be those of ‘reality’ they are at the very heart of the real. What is particularly real-ly funny was his inability to take off the mask, so that without the aid of the delightful Edward James (a surrealist patron and poet) he would have suffocated.

Reality sometimes intrudes on art, without a theoretical basis for doing so.