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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

surrealism & sexuality#1 « Previous | |Next »
December 26, 2003

Trevor, when I unpacked another cartoon of my books just before Xmas, I came across Bernard Smith's Modernism's History (UNSW Press, 1998). I looked up what he said on surrealism, and I was presently suprised to find Bataille mentioned. So I kept on reading.

Anyway, this is what Smith says about surrealism:


?"The Surrealists saw themselves as the inheritors of the romantic tradition and the role they played ....may be viewed as the expression of a desire to develop and maintain a new role for the imagination in a Modernity posessed technologically of ever-increased power to absorb, transform and appropriate all criticism into celebratory effusions of its technologically driven teleology....For Dada/Surrealism is characterised by its transgression of the sanctities of autonomous art. Surrealism was also systematically transgressive in its approach to language, politics and sexuality."

I knew about the Dadist challenge to autonomous art and the male leer in surrealism. But I didn't know that surrealism was systematically transgressive in its approach to sexuality. Is this the radical edge of surrealism that has been blunted by the art institution?

Did you? I'd been guided by Adorno's scorn for Surrealism in Aesthetic Theory--trapped in a self-contained subjectivity---and so never bothered to explore it. The radical edge of surrealism is what Bataille opens the door to and explores. Bataille is not even mentioned in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.

So I wonder who or what Smith has in mind? It would be interesting to find out, now that sex is everywhere in the mediascape; the images of sex cater to male desire through the construction of representations of feminine beauty; gender stereotypes have grown more rigid in explicit ads and movies, and we continue to hear calls for sexual abstinence (to combat aids?)

Smith does not say who or what he has in mind. Could it be Arshile Gorky?
SurrealismGorky1.jpg
A. Gorky, Study for the Liver is the Cock's Comb, 1943

This study then becomes this abstract expressionist painting:
SurrealismGorky2.jpg
Gorky, The Liver is the Cock's Comb, 1944.

I don't see much that is sexually transgressive there.

Or did Smith have Andre Masson in mind? Or Matta?

With Matta I can see the poetry of sex:
SurrealismMatta1.jpg
Matta
But little else.

It is probably Andre Masson whom Smith has in mind:
SurrealismMasson1.jpg

And:
SurrealismMasson2.jpg

So sexuality in Surrealism starts as a personal declaration of recreating desire, moves on to express the way that imaginings that are never wholly one's own run riot over the conscious mind. Desire loosens both the boundaries of the possessive liberal individual, and the liberal distinction between public and private as desires spill over into art institutions and political ones.

But these surrealists did not seriously question the conventions of gender roles as did Cindy Sherman, with her postmodern wave of appropriation and artifice that focused on heterosexual desire. Films, such as Moulin Rouge, are full of corsets and perversion and gender-bending decadence. Now that sexuality in all its forms has become mainstream, can look back on surrealism as a precursor as an expression of desire and imagination unbound?

Aids is important here. Up to that point you could have sex with who you liked, when you liked. You didn't have to think about it as an issue, it wasn't a big deal. When AIDS came along it changed the way people behaved sexually as it was too risky to have a one-night stand or casual sex.

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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:40 PM | | Comments (0)
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