The Nightlight Market

–What is Neosurrealism?

”Neosurrealism” has been repeatedly launched as a catchphrase for minor directions within art and literature where people eclectically pick up some alleged lessons from surrealism and put them back in a more or less conformist framework within cultural production. It has been particularly big in the US, perhaps needless to say. Some time ago, it was mainly used for pop-influenced Dalí-ist painting, but today this current is mainly (and more properly) referred to as ”fantastic art”.

Instead, there has been in recent years several efforts to put the headlight on surrealist influences in American poetry, often but far from always referred to as ”neosurrealism”. This includes a number of different efforts, with academic theses (Tursi, Lampe), popular introductions (Joron, Caples) and online discussions. Usually it has been about promoting the legacy of Philip Lamantia, and usually it has been put in stark contrast against the organised surrealist movement on the whole and against Chicago surrealism and Franklin Rosemont specifically. In the last year, there has been attempts to tie such threads together, perhaps the most ambitious one being the upstate New York poet John Thomas Allen launching ”The New Surrealist Institute”, publishing a comprehensive anthology of neosurrealist poetry, and seeming to claim to spearhead a movement.

There are many confused domestications of surrealism and they hardly merit detailed study. For lack of something better to do during a short while this summer, when this particular one turned up a few times clustered I was pulled into checking it up. And then it took several weeks for some books to arrive, which I maybe ought not to attempt any detailed summary without having read. It’s not that I am so very interested in the situation of surrealism in the US, even though I would agree that surrealism’s trajectory in that particular country is a critical case for its entire post-classic history. In fact I should apologise for length, I just wanted to make this overview accessible once I laboriously obtained it, and couldn’t help restating a number of basic points about poetry in the connection.

Why neosurrealism?

Obviously, the word ”neosurrealist” is pointless, implying either an imagined historical rift breaking up surrealist continuity, or an ambiguous volontary departure without the imagination to find something positively given to characterise the new direction.

From the viewpoint of surrealism, a course correction relevant to surrealism typically makes sense to integrate into surrealism, rather than break off as a separate branch. And furthermore, to the extent that such developments have indeed needed to be organisationally separate, and have had something relevant to offer, in the past, they have often (relevantly) preferred to refer to their own direction by its own characteristics rather than its distance to - but still dependence on - surrealism (clear in the cases of Acephale and the Sociological College, of Lettrism and Situationism, somewhat less clear but still positively stated in ”Cobraism”, nuclearism, imaginism etc). Claiming to be a neo- is like not quite living up to the real thing while unable to come up with something original.

Also, in the literary discussion in the US, it seems like ”neosurrealism” has been used interchangeably with ”soft surrealism”: which is even clearer about what it concerns: a vague inspiration without any serious commitment.

Neosurrealism may be used as a descriptive term. Just like we might give the descriptive name ”postsurrealism” to any direction manifested by someone with the intention of leaving surrealism (regardless of whether it succeeds or not), we might call ”neosurrealism” any attempt to reinvent surrealism (volontarily or involontarily) without picking up the trail of historical continuity. Inventing the wheel over again. 

This might be the local enthusiasts who pick up some old book by Breton and wants to start it up again, unaware of the contemporary movement. Such neophytes are often quite happy to join forces and pool resources once they find the movement, and their ”neosurrealism” is just a temporary phase.

Though if they feel intimidated by the presence of peers, and by the distinctions made from historical experience, they might feel a need to defend their own individual version of ”neosurrealism” with its particular compromises, additions, subtractions and emphasises, and with themselves as the foremost theorists, and stubbornly maintain their alleged uniqueness. In some cases this would express mainly a nostalgia over the real dynamism of some youthful heroic years against the wind before finding accomplices. But empirically, it seems like most such cases instead involve a reluctancy to apply surrealism broadly, to see political and philosophical implications, and to grapple with it on the level of everyday life – and instead to reduce it again to either literature or pictorial art.

Not only is this remarkably similar to the common old boring academic approach, and tends to go hand in hand with common old careerist concerns, where the ”autonomy” is mainly an autonomy of pragmatism, where you should be free to make your own choices about all the concessions you are doing for the sake of attention by critics and publishers, and not be criticised for it.

It is a bit weird, isn’t it, that restricting poetry to the literary context, staying alone, and adapting to expectations in the literary market, is considered free, autonomous, mature and advanced –while integrating poetry with other necessities of life, joining up with each other, and working within a demanding tradition and utilising reciprocal questioning and criticism, is considered dogmatic, narrowminded and isolated.

Surrealism and literature

A lot of the discussion about neosurrealism is about categorisation, who is a neosurrealist and who is not. At the same time, some of these categorisers regret that those who talk about surrealism, especially those who defend it, always always tend to talk about dividing and demarcation lines. Well, it’s not like anyone can actually decide who’s a real surrealist and who’s not. Any demarcation line needs to be identified and negotiated based on the purpose with it. That’s why it might occasionally be interesting to discuss delineations, specifically in order to reveal one’s purposes. 

There are crucial and quite simple demarcation lines since surrealism does in fact rest on a break. That is for example (in this connection) the break with considering literature as the major battlefield, considering the poem a valuable goal in itself within the system of personal expression, formal elegance, stylistic innovativity, reflection of influences and current trends, and of the development of the history of literature.

In surrealism, the poem is an integrated part in an investigation and an invocation of poetry with the overall aim to transform life and change the world. Anyone who merely wants to write good surrealist poems is not a surrealist. The surrealist keeps writing such poems (or not!) with something else in mind.

And while there are various tropes and manouevres that are common in texts by surrealists, there is no such thing as defining characteristics of a surrealist text. A text recognisable as utilising the same elements as characteristic earlier surrealist texts does not by power of that become a surrealist text. A text based in a surrealist outlook and a surrealist aim is a surrealist text. Especially if written by a surrealist. While other texts relevant for that outlook and aim, and utilising particular poetic means in that spirit, can very well be surrealist texts (of the ”unconsciuously surrealist” genre if you will…) Any eagerness to define criteria for surrealism on the stylistic level seems to reveal an aim to reduce surrealism to a mere topic for academic study within a particular field and to miss completely what surrealism is about.

The current US advocates of neosurrealism position themselves completely within the field of cultural production (especially literature). Someone described it is as that there is currently a vacuum and an open contest for the position as dominant paradigm of the time (after postmodernism), and then considering that surrealism is a suitable candidate for that competition. Of course, even if this was a correct analysis of the current situation in culture (which I’m sure it’s not), surrealism couldn’t care less about competing over that position…

A poet remains a poet and this is not dependent on designations.

However, the question of who is a great poet and who is not, this must be stressed, DOES NOT MEAN THE SAME THING from a literary and a surrealist perspective. From the literary viewpoint, a great poet is a writing person who writes powerful and impressive poems by mastering the tools of the trade, is aware of canon and utilises it for own purposes, is consistent and designs an oeuvre, a body of work that has a central direction and every now and then offers technical novelties and stylistic brilliance, and exerts a significant influence on other writers.

Most of this is just irrelevant from a surrealist perspective, where a great poet is a researcher without a safety net, if you will fearless psychonaut, with no credentials and no relevant possessions except curiosity and sensibility, mediating the poetic message and furthering it in a dynamic form that forces open some unusual sector of the realm of possibilities and changes the perspective on things, who explores poetry and tries in one way or another to stay true to it, in different areas and significantly including writing poetic texts. The genre of your texts matters little, innovation matters little, your civil position matters little, your ”impact” matters little. Of course, experienced careerists and clumsy beginners alike are capable of writing scattered inflammable poetic outbursts. Certainly, someone can be a great poet from a literary and a surrealist viewpoint alike, but the criteria are very different, and many more are great from only one of the perspectives and ridiculous from the other…

Surrealism is on the other side of a dividing line. Exploring the poetic is an extraliterary challenge. The quest will take very diverse routes, but seeing the point with and gaining some experience of anonymity, collectivity and automatism is probably a crucial corrective against many of the available domestications of poetry. Remember Tzara’s crucial distinction between poetry as a means of expression and poetry as an activity of the spirit. Surrealism’s break involves starting out from the latter side unequivocally. Surrealists are not writers of a particular style or standpoint, surrealists utilise writing as a vehicle, which is among other things a weapon against a given framework of exploitation, boredom, pragmatism, faith, stupidity, noise, productivity demands and miserabilism. For dismissing the dull seductions of the cultural world. For dismissing civilised thematics and self-administrative concerns. For preferring the unknown.

A sun at night?

A Lamantia disciple and recent ”Science Fiction Surrealist” Andrew Joron published the key text of modern American neosurrealism ten years ago, Neo-Surrealism; or, the Sun at Night: Transformations of Surrealism in American Poetry 1966-1999 (2004). His study is a sketchy overview of surrealist inspiration in American poets. As such it is very readable, and contains some interesting observations, suggestions and reading tips. (Apparently there is also a second edition from 2010 with minor updates, which I have not seen; it might make some of the following details irrelevant but hardly the general argument.)

Without actually defining neosurrealism, his pamphlet works hard to make a lot of contradictions and distinctions within poetry, internal and external. It is rhetorically built up around a central opposition between a successful, domestic literary surrealism led by Lamantia and a sterile, isolated organised surrealism represented by the Chicago group. The alleged good pole of the opposition is where the author is sketching a new canon, where inspiration from surrealism, combined with working within a national American poetry scene, publishing in American literary journals, positioning visavis American literary schools are crucial, and acquiring academic positions is a meriting proof of quality…  Indeed, it seems to be a criterion for his neo-surrealism that it is specifically American and not closely relating to its European models. (”It is not a question of nationalism but of opening a space for cultural selfdefinition” says Joron.)

Of course neither aspect works well to provide a neat separation. Obviously Lamantia, the rimbaldian hero and patron saint of the one pole, himself (as Joron admits) was involved with the organised movement too. Any other writers that Joron recognises as relevant are counted in the literary, non-Chicago camp, including Ted Joans, Rikki Ducornet, and especially Jayne Cortez, despite themselves. (While at the same time Joseph Jablonski is explicitly excluded from the discussion for being ”orthodox” even if his poetry is acknowledged. Joron’s disciple Caples extends the same backhanded recognition to Penelope Rosemont herself.) Joans and Ducornet are very well-known within surrealist collaborations and apparently well-known outside them. Lamantia covered both domestic concerns and international ones, as did Nanos Valaoritis. In fact, Valaoritis wrote an enthusiastic introduction to contemporary American poetry in an issue of the French ”orthodox” Surréalisme in 1977, claiming that the American poets, especially the Californian post-Beats, were all internationalist and non-chauvinistic and relevant to surrealism (he might have been wrong). And Pete Winslow was a hardcore surrealist but is for some reason posthumously considered a neosurrealist. While another serious Lamantian disciple, Laurence Weisberg, is much held forth nowadays by some of the surrealists and some of the neos alike. An Allan Graubard never denied his basic surrealist position yet still has been active on the domestic cultural scene. Ronnie Burk was active on the domestic scene while quite hardcore. In recent times, everybody hails Will Alexander, and both he and Sotere Torregian have repeatedly appeared in surrealist connections, and goddamn even Joron himself was in the recent Hydrolith #2. Such sheep and wolves don’t quite congregate in separate corners of the field. It is a kind of a borgesian, non-exclusive, taxonomy.

If I think an internationalist perspective fits better with the dynamics of poetry than the concern for a domestic literary scene does, and if I think academic positions are statistically likely to suffocate poetry rather than intensify it, I would still argue that the power in a poem is not so much dependent on where the author fits in a constructed classification scheme, and I’m not going to defend the merits of particular poets against a literary judge of taste (for example listing particularly good poets in the organised half). This is confused and obviously breeds confusion.

A lamp that throws no light

Lampe’s 2014 thesis about is basically saying the same as Joron’s pamphlet but in ten times more pages, even though the topic is not explicitly ”neosurrealism” but surrealism in American poets (again disregarding active surrealists). There is useful background information and interesting observations here too, but most of the effort is simply wasted because it is all about discussing whether this or that poem is actually a surrealist poem, in purely textual terms, thus expecting there to be trustworthy stylistic criteria for surrealism, and expecting surrealism to be something that has its full meaning in the literary sphere concerning poems – and thus the whole discussion is of course alien to surrealism.

This restrictive circumscription is conscious and explicit; it is after all an academic work which rests on restricting its question and making this explicit. Its just that in this case such a restriction also removes the ground for saying anything interesting about poetry in the light of surrealism, which otherwise might have been considered to be the topic.

I mean, all the way back from classic structuralism and throughout a more poetically-minded sense of close reading, there are certainly interesting observations to be made about surrealist texts as texts too, even in an academic context, if the question is what they bring, convey and invoke, what they open up towards, not if the question is whether they are to be judged as surrealist or not, according to the narrow criteria one has just put up for oneself (and not even explicitly): this becomes simply a juridical question of no consequence.

An invisible trail in the dark: constructing a canon

The autohistoriography of neosurrealism is more or less this: the American poets reacted against a perceived arrogance of the visiting European exile surrealists during the war, with their lack of understanding of something specifically American, so surrealist inspiration got foothold only through the significantly different and local New York School poetry and then Beat poetry. Then came ”Deep Image poetry” as an antithesis drawing some renewed inspiration from surrealism but staying separate from it, and even more so with its successor ”Language poetry”, and then there were various mini-schools of descendants of these four major domestic trends. The most significant surrealist forum has been, according to the Americans, the little poetry magazine Kayak (and its successor Caliban). This since the surrealist movement, which has itself again been present now in an autochthonous guise since the 60s, has been ”orthodox” and ”isolated” in being active in the international movement rather than focusing on the domestic cultural scene, and therefore lacks significance.

That great neon sign

Apparently, the obsession with expressing something particularly ”American” is shared between a Neosurrealist and most of US culture including Hollywood, Hiphop, Walt Disney and George Bush; this is indeed not necessarily nationalistic but only displays an excessive focus on cultural identity: what we call identity politics, ambiguous when it comes to minority identities, hardly priding when it comes to identities with hegemonic qualities.

(And wasn’t, at least for those who aren’t openly reactionary among those who keep obsessing with what is American, one of the crucial things about it that it would be very including and syncretistic concerning all the various elements brought in by immigrants from all directions (the old ”melting pot” metaphor)? One prospective neosurrealist anthology editor, Mark Tursi, raised the question whether certain named immigrants should be discarded for not being American, and couldn’t understand when this ”innocent” question made some of his correspondents upset.)

Poetry to express your nationality? Hey, even if those old universalist fantasies of poets are obviously vain in parts (which doesn’t make them quite irrelevant by the way), then still isn’t a crucial element in poetry, and a very important reason for people to pick it up, the urgent need to refuse and abandon given cultural identifications and explore metamorphosis and alternative identifications, exotic if necessary?

While the obsession with involvement with the domestic literary scene is probably more instrumental. Teleologically this might be explained as ”in order to be able to influence the direction of national culture”, but practically it is probably just good old careerism. To make a career you need to expose your name in the local context, you need to get personally acquainted with your superiors and your more successful peers who might help you attain positions, connect you with other influential people, etc. Coming into the light within a ”small magazine” gives the required dose of collectivity: you need a certain amount of mutual help in everybody’s parallell goal of exposure, and being associated with the network around a magazine is of course a conveniently non-committal way of doing so, without the risks and efforts and naïvity of an actual collective activity of exploring poetry and its consequences together…

A flash of hipness

It might be good to remember that back in the Beat days, both Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans provided links between surrealism and beat. But while Lamantia at this time was only retrospectively referring to his youth surrealist experience, Joans was actively involved in surrealism. Lamantia became pulled back into surrealism later, but being a Beat legend with a legendary surrealist connection became much more of his heritage than being active in surrealism (and famously acknowledged no particular contradiction between surrealism and neither his Beat stardom nor his catholic faith, or at least no contradiction which wasn’t smoothly appropriated as the psychonaut’s love of contradiction itself…). In contrast with Joans, who remained a surrealist militant his entire life. Nanos Valaoritis too has been spanning both over time, but in his work in North America probably far more as a Beat with a surrealist connection, just like Lamantia. But then, in neosurrealist historiography it is suddenly Corso and Kaufman who are the crucial surrealists in Beat more than Joans and Valaoritis.

Since surrealism is not a style, it is not impossible to write surrealist texts in the Beat language. Personally, I have no love for the Beat idiome, and I do tend to associate Beat looseness of form with lack of concentration, and male-chauvinistic selfsufficience, providing an instructive lesson showing the clear dividing line between lazy stream-of-consciousness spontanism and the seriousness of an automatic enquiry. However I will readily admit that Joans and Lamantia (and Winslow and others, especially if you count Jayne Cortez in this track) reach further than this and provide a starting point for an enquiry into the relationship between B & S that may lead to more interesting conclusions than personal statements of taste and suspicion. Who’s there to do such an enquiry without feeling a need to defend the honour of ordinary American poetry, nor to stop at merely stylistic criteria for purely literary distinctions?

A flicker down the well

Already ”deep image poetry” is essentially neosurrealism, in the early 60s: a pure-blooded homegrown American variety of some kind of surrealism stripped of its morals, its spiritual discipline, its historical experience, its sense of movement, its critical thinking, its politics, its collectivity, its weirdness, its humour, and instead merged with pure literary concerns, good-old eclecticist-seductive Jungian psychology, academic english-language modernism and an overall pretentious modernist syncretism. Significant for this strain is that it considers bombastic romantic stalinist Neruda an even better surrealist than the surrealists, and that the most persistent proponent Robert Bly founded the ”men's movement”.

Already many of the direct followers of this deep image school, and even more so current neosurrealists, were repelled by its pretentiousness, and some by its international outlook and europhilia (but few by its eclecticism and regressive politics). So many lapsed back into a certain playfulness, into Beat-style loose compositional form, ”street” elements and popular culture references, a lot of elements from Science Fiction - and/or into a more experimental approach to language.

Do you like to see my solitary vessel

A cornerpost in the neosurrealist historiographies is the poetry magazine Kayak, edited by George Hitchcock in California 1964-1984, where a lot of the surrealist-influenced American poets published. This is a typical semi-underground magazine with a surrealist tendency, what is usually called ”surrealisant” in French (surrealising). A notable amount of contributions and even the overall presentation is influenced by surrealism, but in very different ways (including the leading ”deep image” poets), and alongside material which is clearly not, and most importantly without any explicit defense of surrealism as such - nor any other explicit platform - for the contributors. A bunch of contributors have also been associated with the historical surrealist movement, a fact which is not mentioned by the neosurrealist historiographers: some of these are claimed for neosurrealism: Valaoritis, Pete Winslow, H R Hays, several not (the national criterion?) like Ken Smith, Michael Bullock, Ludwig Zeller, especially remarkable is the silence concerning John Digby, a persistent contributor whose collages had a significant impact on the magazine’s looks, and who might have started the collaboration back in England but then moved over to the US and was actively involved. Anyway, the journal is deemed way too "eurocentric" for the neosurrealist stick.

I have seen only small fragments of Kayak, but personally I do enjoy such little magazines when they are playful and serious - but its very provinciality, modesty and selfimposed restriction of scope, is not necessarily something good in poetic terms compared with the simultaneous hellraising approaches throughout the diversity of its contemporary US surrealist periodicals, like Arsenal, Antinarcissus, Octopus-Typewriter, Glass Veal, Beef Sphinx, and others… 

The New Candle of John Thomas

There is a very entertaining discussion posted online a few years ago when one of these academics (Mark Tursi) wanted to make a big anthology based on Joron’s concepts.

But apparently that came to nothing and the anthology that eventually did surface was by an enthusiastic newcomer named John Thomas Allen, who also founded the ”New Surrealist Institute” and apparently has been quite active in social media. There is a blog including scattered more or less interesting interviews, reflections and poems. What is weird about it that this NSI is held forth as a new avantgarde movement, separate from other groupings. And at the same time it doesn’t publish collective games or collective statements, everything is presented by the leader personally. The others might not even be aware that they are in a ”group”.

What is explicitly presented as the manifesto of this movement is the anthology, presumably in its entirety, ”Nouveau’s Midnight Sun: Transcriptions from Golgonooza and beyond” (2014). It is a rather thin collection of poems with a personal and enthusiastic but not very thorough introduction by the editor. Of the crowd included in the book, there seems to be a few neosurrealists in the sense of clueless re-inventors, paired with several post-new-york-school-veterans and few post-californian-beat veterans, and their diverse followers, providing a lot of manifest surrealist influence fluctuating between the several-times-watered-down and the faithful-halfdigested and a lot of scattered namedropping of surrealist works and quotes (and a token experienced surrealist in Bogartte). Contributors are introduced not so much with a background sketch nor an attempt to characterise their poetic quest, but with anecdotes as to what they each contributed in the editor’s spiritual quest (or networking trajectory) along with a bit of the usual citing of selected academic degrees and teaching posts, prizes and awards received (seriously! can you Americans stop this? can’t you see that even if being a poet was about credentials - which it certainly isn’t - then simple official acceptance is not one that merits…)

Of sources for his variety of surrealism, Allen in all his texts keeps referring mainly to academic art historian Celia Rabinovitch and the later, ex-surrealist, religious existentialist, David Gascoyne. It follows the ”spiritual” strain in surrealism attributed to Lamantia. There might be such a strain and it might be worth following, but it would be more interesting to found it more in own experience than in renegades and academics. And while we all are happy with the notion of ”profane illumination” and a metaphysical dimension of surrealism, while some of us have dived into thorough studies of alchemy, gnosticism, occultism and whatnot while others have not, any attempts to reconcile surrealism with theology and with churches, also in the vaguest sense, have been either missing the point by reducing surrealism to some kind of profound humanism, or have sensed and somehow lived the obvious contradiction. Citing an academic for legitimity and then admitting one is at a quest of ”combining Surrealism and God” (!) does not sound like a particularly dramatic spiritual departure…

However, and this is important, while Allen speaks of ”a new surrealism” and his title clearly links with Joron’s, he does not in his texts invoke Neosurrealism as opposed to orthodox surrealism, and he does not bring up the national criterion, nor seem enthusiastic about what is American, nor raise the domestic cultural market criterion, and he does not attack Franklin Rosemont. He is simply an energetic enthusiast intent on leading a supposedly sleeping movement to new glory (last time, there was some Internet artists who suggested that Photoshop and the Internet had finally revived the sleeping movement and set it back upon its path to due fame). Maybe it isn’t really sleeping, and maybe it isn’t looking for new glory, and maybe it doesn’t need new self-advertising leaders?

(If indeed this is inteded as surrealism rather than neosurrealism, it may be regarded as a parallell intervention to the recent neophyte surrealist online journal Peculiar Mormyrid. Even looser in its circumscriptions, combining various allegedly surrealist submissions from all around including those of many an organised or experienced surrealist of more exhibitions leanings, it also has a quite different tone. With very unusual (unamerican?) modesty emphasising itself being a ”fledgling” surrealist journal, trying out collective games (though only on the blog part of the webpage and not in the journal, only online and not in the flesh…), mixing texts of different genres and all kinds of images rather than focusing on the poem, it does not make these bold or controversial statements (nor any theoretical-level statements at all), which may perhaps make it look hopelessly timid and vague. But more importantly, at least a small number of participants give the impression that they actually want to play the game, surprise themselves and step into the doorway of the unknown, rather than make a name for themselves.)

Conclusion

In this post, I have made an attempt to understand what people are trying to put into the concept Neosurrealism by way of some significant texts around it. I am not dealing with the poems that are considered to constitute the core of the thing, not even if more programmatic by its advocates. Simply because some of it is ok, some even very good, and quite a bit of it is really poor, and it is not very interesting to sit and judge over poems, especially not to reprimand people for writing poor poems. What I am interested in here is what the concept might mean, if it may constitute a movement, and what relationship it might have to surrealism.

Many people are clearly easy-going eclecticists with a ”fear of touch” who think that actively associating with an actual movement (rather than just a ”school of writing”) is a compromise of integrity. That’s one of the explanations for neosurrealism.

But then this issue of the domestic scene seems crucial. Anyone who is not specifically directed towards the US domestic literary situation, not actively relating to local developments, bickerings, and local minor traditions of using, misusing or refusing foreign influences, and not publishing in domestic journals for the betterment of the national literature, are obviously disregarded as aloof elitists or madmen.

And finally, it seems to still be about the Rosemont factor; the traumatic impact on the peaceful domestic scene by an ultraradical verbal onslaught claiming tradition and principles, like that of the Chicago group. Any living surrealism will question your raison d’être if you are an aspiring writer and academic, and the Chicago group raised this point of view in a version which was rather healthily devoid of shyness, civil concerns and compromise (some of their polemics might not have been quite on target over the years, but the basic argument here is clear as a bell). The massive complaints of how ”isolated” and ”sterile” this do come out as something of a self-contradiction; apparently it did have a rather wide impact in teaching people that surrealism wasn’t something that you could freely adapt to your own fuzzy within-literary concerns, local eclecticism and career dreams without raising some objections…

For a moment there, I had a paranoid thought that these facets of Neosurrealism (whose presence in surrealist networks is symptomatic) would join forces with some of the more bitter old US surrealists in an unholy alliance where open-minded ”lack of orthodoxy”, resentment against old bully Franklin Rosemont, and giving up the hopes of group activity, internationalism and desire for immediate change would form the common ground. But on the other hand, why?

It may be regrettable that the recent resurgence of discussion about surrealist organisation in the US, while having merits in bringing unknown anecdotes and long-circulated rumours into the open (Note: this current discussion may have as its headlight the massive Invisible Heads anthology; but it must be noted that as anthology and long-term documentation its value goes far beyond any such rhetorical function), still retains its bedrock in who did something bad to whom 40 years ago. But it is not confined to that. Not all contacts and alliances being made are based on politeness, shared resentment, or hope of reciprocation. There are still hopes beyond that. Whoever is a surrealist will remain a surrealist for reasons other than making a name and reforming literature. Whoever is a poet will be a poet regardless of labels. Whoever is a careerist will do their careerist thing, and keep aiming for recognition by superiors while eventually turning against their less successful peers or followers, once they have no free additional cred to give. Surrealism has no legitimity to offer.

Neo-surrealism is of course pointless in itself as a label, but possibly pragmatically useful as a warning sign since it is usually applied wherever the major concerns are to claim ”inspiration” from surrealism for reforming literature and promoting careers within the borders of the United States. Even though I would be much more interested in not cementing such a border and instead seeing poets keep on wriggling with the tempting challenges of extraliterary concerns and poetry itself and possibly even become surrealists rather than literary figures one day…  Whoever is badmouthing or misrepresenting surrealism is not a big deal. The main point is that poetry is so much more an adventure, so much more impractical, and even so much more fun, than neosurrealism or any other literary endeavour. Surrealism is about changing life and transforming the world, it does not wish to reform literature and promote careers; this is a simple and useful criterion.

MF

The Dignity of Art

In the 20s, surrealist attitudes to art were partly polemical. In order to lay bare the true creative mechanisms and their accessability for everyone, there were powerful attacks on the dignity of art. Surrealists emphasised automatic texts, dream accounts, then collage, then found objects. Exhibiting a urinal had just earlier been a great scatological joke as well as a serious questioning of the boundaries of art and art’s self-understanding and pompous dignity. Of course, from the surrealist viewpoint, these were never primarily provocations and nivellations, it was always about the actual findings and their poetic potential, but also very much polemically about the accessibility of this potential.

The coup ”worked”. Pranks and provocations were accepted as a part of art, and also the more democratic, less educated and more unintelligable visions such as those brought about by the surrealists were accepted as a part of art. Eventually, and that was a later development, conceptual art was established; creativity and skills of realisation were both altogether abandoned as criteria. And what happened to the dignity of art? Well, it’s still there, but only as a power structure. Only in the structure of institutions and funding agencies that decides who is an artist and who is not, and then it is up to the certified artists (who have a proper art education and a cv with received grants and a backing gallerist) to decide what is art and what is not. There is no dignity in art except for this power structure. Everybody will react, when something pretentious and ugly comes in their way, by thinking ”ok, never mind, it’s obviously art” and look away as when ignoring a drunk in the street. Provocations through art don’t work well, and provocations of art are self-contradictory as they often pay well within official art. It is futile to question the concept of art through art, because that’s what a major chunk of official art is doing and there is little left to question. Except the institutional form itself. Which is perhaps best questioned not by grand or small gestures within its own sphere, but by maintaining essential creativity outside of it. As millions of sunday painters, autodidacts, obsessed, odd visionaries, absentminded scribblers, children, madmen, street artists, surrealists, housewives, underground artists, and study-circle attendants do on a daily basis anyway.

Therefore the concept of outsider art or art brut is, as has been noted before, becoming superfluous at the same time as it contains that which is of uttermost importance. It becomes art itself, because there is no official art to be outside of, except as for its institutional structure itself, which is usually of extremely little interest.

But still, some people animated by inner necessity will even now continue to try the route of official art, of art schools, grant applications and gallerists, just to try to procure an opportunity to be able to create all day without starving for it. A lot of really beautiful things are in fact being done also within the art world. People are that desperate. If you go looking for interesting art, you will probably find some. Of course it is a small fraction of all the aspiring artists out there, but since these are very many, it’s still quite a lot. Surely far fewer than those who do similar or equally or more interesting things without trying to squeeze it or themselves into the art institution, but since self-promotion is the major work task of any contemporary artist it is often easier to find these exceptions within the art world than it is to find those who struggle less for recognition and are often happy to stay out of the limelight. Thus, even for extremely suspicious surrealists, there is a lot of good art to find from card-carrying artists who struggle in the art world, it is enough to fill exhibitions or journals or assemble alliances for those who want to do that.

But just because we are devoted to poetic visions this doesn’t mean we have any business promoting the careers of careerists who happened to hit a pregnant ore. The major demarcation criterion will not lie in who is capable of producing striking and powerful works, that is a little bit too wide circumscription, but rather in the attitudes of the artist. It is certainly not the attitudes of the artist that makes a work good or not, but it is definitely that which makes the company of the artist bearable or not. It is possible to collaborate with people who see art as something serious enough to demand a setting that recognises the challenges it poses, who do not do things to please, who do not do things to impress the impressarios, the critics, the tutors and the celebrities, who do not do things to make their name known, but who take their own creative urge seriously enough to dare stay in the shade if necessary and not to start bartering with it as soon as an opportunity arises. It is in fact those who are more serious about the possibilities of art who are usually more modest about their own contribution and more prone to participate in investigations, experiments and games. With a basic attitude that the point of creativity lies in creation and not in the market and institutions it is far easier to take part in playing games, in collective enquiries, in uncertain adventures without guarantees, in manifestations and initiatives and refusals in other media, based on what the dynamics of the creativity, of the random or fate-given discoveries, of the poetic spirit, seems to demand.

But what happened, in this context, to the democratic dimension of denigrating the dignity of art? Well, the production of images overflowed and the art institution swallows anything. We hardly need to convince anyone. And there is no need to stain art, pull it down into the gutter with us. Art has no dignity left, and there is nothing to win in attaining the position of being art. On the other hand, denying any significance of art by postulating definitions where art is anything bad which is determined by the art institution, and anything good outside the art institution is by definition not art, as is perhaps suggested by Madrid surrealists or at least their sympathisers, seems like a pointless semantic trick or an inconsequential battle against windmills.

So, some of the simplest procedures in the surrealist bag of tricks, originally overdetermined by their polemical function, are at this point very little but well-known party tricks and hardly vehicles for transgression and vision. Especially collage. Which has become a bit of an identity politics affair for surrealists rather than an enquiry into the unknown. The idea with collage was that anyone would be able to make up atmospheres, haunted spaces, and remarkable new combinations, in an impersonal language independent of acquired drawing and painting skills. Exquisite corpses may be traditional too, but in exquisite corpses there is still the element of creating something new outside of your own control, while in collages you have picked all the elements yourself and paste them together in a form that is, despite good intentions, often pleasing to the eye far more than to the imagination, and often pleasing to the eye simply because they remind you of Max Ernst or of some other classic surrealist art that you hold dear, or because the parts are interesting in themselves.

Pictorial creation still makes an unrelenting sense, as vehicle of imagination and the exploration of the unknown.

editorial for now

An icecrawler, with glycol in its blood or not, still takes a nap now and then.
    At the same time as Blogspot statistics showed that The Icecrawler/Heelwalker actually had quite a lot of readers, contributions ran thin. Designed as a collective project, it had then become too dependent on its editor, and when contribitions had since long run short and the editor's capacity was reduced or rerouted, the site had to become dormant. Maybe this is not surprising, considering for example that three of the individuals adding the most input to the general discussion as well as occasional individual texts all currently have their individual blogs. (Does this mean that they are modern enough so that they have an organic relationship with their computer and act through it more directly than they do through discussions and agreements with others, or does it mean that they are traditional enough to simply prefer working with their individual name or nickname as the accumulative heading? Ah, never mind.) (In this particular area, I don't know if it needs to be said that this does not imply that group activity as such is disrupted.) Or does it mean that Icecrawler is an obsolete project that fails to enthuse most of its instigators? Or shall we believe in some natural cyclicity? We'll see. We shall at least not masochistically assume an imperative to frequently update just as a way to argue to ourselves that we exist or to maintain someone's attention at any price. In fact we may even deliberately prefer to keep far away from that logic. A more thorough understanding of what we can do in the illumination from surrealism, and a more thorough understanding of surrealism itself, are not topics that will contest for the attention of the bored general public one week and be outdated the next week. While we must of course recognise the inevitable fact that less frequently updated sites are sites which are less frequently visited looking for updates. Well, this is all in the manner of messages in bottles anyway. A trail of bottles in different colours nightly rocking by our little stretch of coast. The beach forager who finds them is no less random and chosen than the troll who releases them.
    The Icecrawler have just been updated with a large number of items. Some are older, and placed further below to simulate the blog's chronological structure, while others are more recent: in assorted topics, including some discussion over items in the recently published vast surrealist anthology What Will Be.

Outside of art or outside of surrealism

(unpublished post from july 2013)

With the new issue of Patricide (#6), though full of interesting things, I cannot but get the feeling that editor Neil Coombs is abandoning his earlier attempts to establish credability among surrealists and aims higher into the vaguely surrealismophilic art world this time.
    Considering the suspiciousness with which the Patricide project has been met with by many surrealists, one could perhaps speak of revealing true colours. But that would be a selfrighteous self-fulfilling prophecy. Coombs has indeed made some serious attempts, been persistent over a period of several years, opened up a few interesting discussions, and if never lucid also never, in spite of certainly frustrating resistance encountered, turned around into ressentment-full all-emotional verbage against the high horses of many surrealists. I still have a feeling I don't know quite what this was all about.
    There is a certain significant overlap with a large official ongoing show of outsider art at official Hayward Galleries in London. There is due thanks, without whom the present work would not have been possible, to some of the leading central figures in the modern reintegration of art brut into the art world, namely the leading British outsider art dealer Henry Boxer, and the leading British outsider art historian academic and catalog preface writer Roger Cardinal.
    Roger Cardinal started out in the vicinities of surrealism, was associated with the Paris group from Canada in the 60s, then a member of some of the shortlived British surrealist groups in the late 70s. He had not been heard from in explicit surrealist connections for quite some time when it was noted that he had started publishing the usual antisurrealist grossly misrepresenting opinions about surrealism, in connection with the planned Svankmajer extravaganza at the annual surrealismological conference of West Dean in 2010. This was in fact a big issue for the Prague surrealist group, and therefore for the Paris group and for the British surrealists at the time. As an additional sign of Patricide coming from a position somewhere else than within surrealism, the whole scandal of Cardinal's antisurrealism (three long years ago) is not mentioned with a word here and he is offered space and admiringly presented as the big authority and claimed to have written "the first book about art brut" (p 123) (in 1972!). First? What about Dubuffet? What about Prinzhorn 1922?
    Coombs employs an eclectic and partly journalistic investigative method. Instead of thoroughly studying the subject he is addressing, he invites anybody to contribute on the subject whatever their perspective on it might be, and amidst these motley sources he picks a few to interview as authorities. In the case of his "Surrealism and Music" issue, of the authorities he picked, some were just irrelevant and said nothing interesting, some were active surrealists and could perhaps have been expected to say something clarifying but didn't, and some were surrealists who actually contributed to shedding light on the subject. In the case of art brut Coombs isn't messing around trying to pry info out of active surrealists anymore, he goes directly to the big oracles in Britain: the big academic authority Cardinal and the big commercial authority Boxer. And does not problematise at all the hierarchy and the artworld or para-artworld map that positions the big academic and the big salesman as the two main authorities. And does not question what they are saying and the position they are saying it from.
    But within the material here, there is a lot of implicit critique of that in the stories of the artists themselves, or of non-authoritative thinkers on the subject, mainly Stephen Kirin and John Holt. (The latter is a priest, which does not preclude him from saying something interesting, but the fact that he is "openmindedly" given space without even an editorial discussion about the fact, again shows that Patricide does not struggle anymore to be a surrealist journal.) Surrealists Renay Kerkman, Shibek and Martin Marriott contextualise the concept a bit. Tony Convey says "Outside art has spawned a new academy with its own Popes, Bishops and Gatekeepers". Indeed, and the editor doesn't mind boosting their positions further.
    Of course, the plethora of artists, journals, exhibitions and museums of outsider art, art brut, insane art, autodidactic art, folk art, etc, show us a lot of magnificent stuff, teach us a lot about creative practice and about the human condition and about imaginative and social possibilities and about the world. The major problem with advertising it is that there is nothing particular to advertise: this is of course what art is really about – these are not some new and cool artists to highlight, they are not the representatives of a particular style or movement that merit recognition: they are simply artists, like the rest of us, with a moving and inspiring vision or not...
    By rhetorical necessity, acknowledging art brut when you are in the art world (as for example an academic art historian or a salesman) cannot mean to give it a polemical edge against educated and conventional art, because that would mean eventually sawing off the branch on which one is sitting, so instead it must be about claiming it must get the recognition it earns within the art connections, that is being reintegrated, and accepted in official art with the values, standards and criteria of official art basically unchanged. And very much of the recognition is specifically about giving this kind of art its share of the art market, having art dealers specialising in the works of these actually innovative, imaginative and obsessed people. Hooray, their works became commodities too! This integrative art reformism is clearly different from a surrealist perspective.
    A surrealist perspective would instead point at this as a sphere which cannot be separated from what we all are doing, and while recognising many of the most striking and moving creators coming from this angle as heroic and inspiring examples, maintaining this not as example doing good in the competition, but rather as propulsing a devastating critique of the largely stifling imagination-less prestige-driven narrow boring spectacle offered by official art! And resuming the old slogan, it is not the outsiders that need to get in (into the museums, the art market, the art history books etc) but the insiders that need to get out...
    By the way, the Hayward show is really interesting, having a somewhat unusual focus on physics, mathematics and architecture. The cathedral paintings of Marcel Storr, the beautiful utopian dollhouses of Bodys Isek Kingelez, the exquisite junk sculpture of Emery Blagdon, the automatic painting of Guo Fengyi. The poor man's Bellmer, doll fetishist Morton Bartlett, wasn't as spectacular as the advertisements wanted. Strangely enough, by Lee Godie only her photobooth self-portraits, and by Eugene von Bruenchenhein only his portaits of his wife and not at all his marvellous paintings. This is probably an expression of a will to show how "outsider" artists indulge in all kinds of media/technologies rather than just keep drawing/painting. But we knew that, didn't we? And isn't there are particular point with the very unprejudicedness about the medium that many artists display: even if they have a preferred medium for their daily obsession, they are remarkably openminded about utilising whatever materials is at hand for similar expressions that may look entirely different but sprout from the same urge (again, just like surrealists...). There is also an appendigial show at the Hayward by The Museum of Everything of beautiful works by Sri Nek Chand Saini from his vast sculpture garden in India.

M Forshage

Painting by Tony Convey

Sculpture by Emery Blagdon

a british fauna

Not having time to edit any ambitious discussions in March, I could instead give a certain snapshot of surrealism in Britain based on the fact that a surprising number of surrealist publications has come from there recently. Hopefully the necessary discussion of publicity and organisation inside will make it meaningful as an Icecrawler text. As the interested will already know, there are three surrealist groups in England (SLAG, Leeds, LSG) and some initiatives outside groups.

Rabid delicacies

And allow me quickly pass over SLAG:s e-zine "Rabid estranged juvenile delicacies" for one or the other reason; because I was involved in it myself, because it came already the previous year, because it is available only in electronic not printed form? It is a rather packed piece, focusing on games and collective investigations but also including remarkable individual contributions, many of which have been previously posted at the robber bridegroom blog, and it is available from here.

Less delicate

There was a very recent skirmish over the stupid idea to launch an initiative of surrealists supporting the 4th international, which I also won't be going into here (anyone interested could consider the webpage, the critique, the metacritique, and the metametacritique).

Taste of phosphor

Just like the Leeds surrealist group is in fact the most long-lasting and reliable pole of organisation in British surrealism (ever!), its rather new journal Phosphor is already established as a reliable point of reference. It is unlike the other British publications in that it is in fact informative and rather extrovert, and perhaps also in that is traditional and international (relates to tradition and the organised international movement in a very explicit way). In fact it may be better described as a local facet of international surrealism rather than the organ of a local group, always with a considerable amount of space given to material from the Prague group, with that combined with materials from Madrid, Paris and Chicago seemingly outweighing self-produced material. Which is a bit of a pity, because it is typically the accounts of the ambitious games and experiments of the Leeds group which is the most interesting material in the journal. There is always a substantial international review section as well as some introductory material to Czech surrealism (never British), which both in part seem redundant for the initiated, but thereby also offer necessary distinctions and good news for an external audience (if there is one). Phosphor has a strict layout (no scattered phrases or marginal drawings) and most of the material is compartmentalised into (explicit or implicit) sections with similar space allotment in each issue. Usually there are also a few examples of very good poems and documentary photographs, and the steady flow of amazing drawings by Bill Howe, as well as some more lightweight articles and short-stories.

The latest issue is number three, on the theme of "Memory reclaimed". In it, the local game material feels somewhat less inspired than usual and consists largely of examples from or overviews of a couple of different games rather than full data. Just like in my own experience, it seems like a focus on memory will easily remain on the level of biographical/generational interest, and it requires some substantial effort to sublate the mnemonic images to something of general interest by working with a synthetic/poetic response AND/OR an analytical response in terms of psychoanalytical and epistemological interpretations, such as studying the ontogenetic production of the desire compromise called personality and the anecdote compromise called life experience... Here, there are some haunting images surfacing within the material (as one could expect) but typically not much is done with them. The appendigial shoes game is far more simple and also quite effective, once again proving the emergent convergences and emergent poetry of improvisations of the collective imagination.

So in this issue the brightest light is in fact a historical piece: Krzysztof Fijalkowski's essay about Luca – which could have been both bolder and longer but nevertheless with admirable clarity sketches some of the vertiginous epistemological or methodological questions Luca raised, particularly about the need to reinvent everything, and the background in Romanian surrealism they grew out of, and just by the way it adresses the epistemological level it feels like the item most fruitfully grappling with the issue theme. The second most theoretically ambitious piece is one by Lurdes Martinez of the Madrid group, characteristically extending the extremes in a very explicit, controversial and interesting way, here taking Madrid's debordist dualism to new heights in terms of principled nostalghia when praising a few dusty old speciality shops and some photo album from the 50s: "Everything has suffered the deadly hollowing-out of its most intimate conditions /.../ And this destruction of the natural and human environment to which I refer /.../ has given way to absolute uniformity of living spaces and forms of relationship". Weren't we surrealists the guys who kept claiming that poetry could manifest itself anywhere, and in unexpected forms? Among the rest of the material, which I will not cover in its entirety, there is also a very good poem by Kenneth Cox, a new streak of automatic drawing from Bill Howe, and Gareth Brown as always keeps up an eye towards contemporary developments in radical politics.

Phosphor is very readable – but also rather predictable. I enjoy it much, but it also makes me long to see some strange imbalanced entity presenting detailed, feral or odd lines of investigation from the entire group or individual members thereof. However, in the current form Phosphor comes very close to something that could serve as presenting living surrealism to the reading British public, and with just a small effort to get rid of some remaining internalist jargon and some unnecessary obstacles for readers (as opposed to the many necessary obstacles inherent in the immodest scope of poetry and the perspectives of its offensive defense), it would do this job extremely elegantly, while indeed pushing some of the heavy stuff along with it.

Tailbiting struggles of patricide

Coming from outside, the journal project Patricide has stirred a lot of suspiciousness, discussion and contradictions among surrealists during its brief history. I have been asking its editor questions about it, I have contributed to it, and I have considered the very lack of traditional surrealist aesthetics a relief (all surrealists say there is no such thing as a surrealist aesthetic, and then still so much of the output looks so similar), as well as the mix of active surrealists and various isolated artists a very interesting experiment. There has been sympathetic but vague statements of intention, expecting a solid direction to eventually emerge. With the fourth issue, on "the sound of surrealism" (mostly concerning the question of surrealist music) I am beginning to lose my patience.

The general editorial principle appears to be to make an unprejudiced mixture of active surrealists with random artists (more or less careerist, more or less relevant all together) on a mail-art accept-all-submissions liberal basis. Some of these external artists are indeed such whose work I enjoy and am happy to have got an opportunity to discover (especially Leslie Guy), and editor Neil Coombs' own photographs are often great. Some of the material in Patricide is great, funny, unexpected, thoughtful. But a lot of the contributions are typically irrelevant, more or less conventional, lazily self-sufficient, and symptomatically ignorant about surrealism. And here, the "unprejudiced" editing turns into a statement: that surrealism is in fact more or less anything, that any pedestrian or careerist artist and their view of surrealism is just as valid in terms of surrealism as the most frenzied psychonauts, the hardest-working organisers, the longest-standing activists and the most well-read or clear-thought specialists – that the surrealists' view of surrealism is no more relevant than that of anyone. With previous issues themes, "seaside surrealism" (if interpreted as "oddities on the beach") or "the uncanny", anyone can say something interesting, which could perhaps make sense from a surrealist perspective. The same would be true for "sound" by itself – but "sound and surrealism" is a not only big but difficult subject, you typically have to know something about surrealism to say something very interesting about it, and this "unprejudiced" principle appears fatal when it equates actual surrealism with prejudices and clueless musings about surrealism.

In this issue as before, I note that – contrary to some comrades' hints – it is not the case that it is the surrealists' contributions that are interesting and the various hangarounds that are not interesting. Well, to some extent, here the most informed and thoughtful contribution is by the the authoritative and experienced surrealist musician Johannes Bergmark, while some additional good points are made by Shibek, and Ron Sakolsky provides a selection of important background information, but there are also points by one or two unknown dudes, and some of the card-carrying surrealists mess up some of the facts badly. With the editor sympathetically acknowledging his lack of a clear idea of the topic, he does in fact set out to ask some of the surrealists (and some others). One of the surrealists tells him that alchemy is the same as collage, combining two elements to produce a new third; and another one that alchemy is nonsensical superstition, but then adds that it could also be interpreted as a metaphor for the human totality experience (something like metaphysics in the widest sense). This is frustrating, I thought alchemy was important to surrealism, and surrealists would know what alchemy is about. Of course, being an elusive, secret and actively ambiguous discipline, it will give rise to a manifold of interpretations, but haven't we all seen in some historical studies that it is about metamorphosis, the transmutation of matter (and, by manifest analogy, man and the world) through hard work which is primarily artisanal and mystic, and then perhaps in some sense artistic and/or scientific? Then, when the editor asks what is the place of sound/music in surrealism in comparison with other genres, and one surrealist very sensibly replies something like "oh, interesting things could be done with it, just like with other things, it's not a matter of ranking ways of expression", another one explains that sound has been unacceptably neglected and must now resume its rights because there is a capitalist conspiracy in favor of the visual sense against the audial sense (!).

It is typical in a surrealist journal to perform a certain "nivellation" in terms of putting the great surrealist classics, the best work of one's surrealist contacts, and one's own very finest efforts on the same level as one's various more or less groping attempts, often failed experiments, often unripe artworks, often exagerrated polemics and arrogant new-adept certainty – and this is something good because it emphasises that the communion with the tradition and with great works is an active relationship of creative acquisition and mutual enquiry and not a matter of reifying admiration. Coming from newcomers, it is easy to sympathise with a certain lack of experience and knowledge which is completely made up for by enthusiasm, unreasonable passion, the very wealth of (often mistaken) ideas and ambitions, and with an eagerness to learn more about the tradition.

But typically in a cultural journal with a surrealist label, there is this other type of "nivellation", where the active embodiment of surrealism, and the discussion, playing and activism of the surrealist movement is put on the same level as any musings of the well-meaning unknowledgeable, clueless self-promoters, and active mediators of official misrepresentations. It does not have the unexperienced enthusiast's lack of knowledge but rather something like the cynicism of accepting whatever more or less unrelated ongoing artistic projects as the real thing and not offer suggestions of novelties, no fresh blood. Patricide is more and more appearing like the newcomer without much enthusiasm, energy or new discoveries, but also without very much willingness to learn what has been found out so far. In this issue we get the false impression that "surrealism and music" is an almost completely virginal field, where no real results have yet been made. The few contributions that indicate there has been a rich discussion in surrealism (from the "no music" doctrine, to the massive interest in jazz, to the rock'n'roll-psychedelia connection, to the "surrealism and black music" doctrine, to the improvisation edict, to today's rather pluralistic interest) stand out as isolated secretsayers or madmen whose voices in the desert are not worth more than the hollow platitudes of standard dictionaries. It remains a crucial question for these madmen to consider how eager they are to publish in contexts relativising their solid ground; and there are still some good arguments contradicting each other here.

Massive milkflow down the faces of representatives

The real joker in the deck is a new anthology by the London Surrealist Group, The overflowing milkmaid with curved feet. For a long time the LSG appeared to have no collective activity at all, only scattered individual updates on a blog, but some time ago collective games became more common again, and now a very mixed batch of materials has been collected into an anthology (there is also a new webpage and a sound project). It is difficult to see some particular shared or emergent characteristics, apparently LSG remains consisting of a core group with rather distinct individual projects, and a constantly changing circle of brief members including oral-live-poets, assorted academics, aspiring fine arts students, singer-songwriters and photomodels who are often easy to find self-exposed on the internet without explicit reference or obvious link to surrealism. From the outside it is very difficult to assess what kind of internal group dynamic this is an expression of, or creates opportunities for. However, it is important to note that in the new anthology this motley crew has had the decency and seriousness to not cite author's names for most of the contributions, which is surprising and indeed very admirable (and especially so when some of the contributors may have appeared suspiciously exposure-eager elsewhere).

And, of course, frustrating for the historian-nerd... But also, in the gossip-tangled mess of British surrealism, it probably provokes a more careful reading and focus on what is actually said. In this case, the initial impression of heterogenity, of a very wide variation range in quality, is sustained and deepened. Of course, "quality" of individual items would be secondary to collective curiousness, integrity, vision and honesty – but the latter is also not transparently emerging from the material or presentation. With haphazard layout, the contributions overlap and occasionally perhaps merge in a sympathetic way, but one which still feels like a collage rather than an actual collective direction or entity. And there is no introduction to the group and no explicitly shared statements. There are a few games, but only some are given on a collective level (phrenology walk, an exquisite corpse, perhaps the definitions in the margins?), others dismemberedly by only an individual contribution to them (first-encounters-with-surrealism-enquiry, monster walk, tarot walk). Most of the contents give the impression of a rather thoroughly mixed buffet of individual contributions of considerably varied strength.

The drawings are in fact mostly good (from Layden's characteristic morphological transformations over repetitive wave patterns to blindfold-automatism), as are the photographs (mostly documentary, including double exposures and visual puns) – while the collages are considerably weaker (from industrial-type dustbin-concoctions to expressive but very traditional xylography collage). Among the poems, there are a few oral-poet dynamic jive sermons that may or may not have much to do with surrealism, along with some fresh gallopping-rant-type automatic texts ("Youth Juice" and "Coral Rain"), a lot of poems that seem unnecessarily derivative or sentimental-preciose, and a few which are just great (such as "Multistage Aigrette" and the untitled one handwritten above it). Articles are even more heterogenous. Except for the game accounts, there is some of the habitual tedious whining over public misunderstandings of surrealism (the concept "surreal") with some of the abstract self-boasting and self-deceiving flowery propaganda (the final statement about the absolute genius of creativity) and an apparently pointless mystification (Hicklebaum), but also some interesting theoretical sketches (about the analogy concept) and simple but good introductions (about automatic writing) or rather interesting chronicles by outside sympathisers (about contemporary surrealist cinema).

So, a lot of the material herein is clearly worthwhile, but far more, the anthology itself is a very encouraging sign of ongoing collective activity. Good luck; looking forward to seeing more!

MF