the politics of surrealism

[Michael Clifton]

hello,

I have done some thinking and have come up with this notion about the
early Surrealists. They were hypocrits! They claimed to be in favor of
and supportive of proletarian rights, but I honestly believe that their
sentiments were unsincere. They spoke out against the bourgeoisie, but
it is exactly that class of people who supported them. In the early
years of the movement (political or artistic? who's to say?) a large
majority of the Surrealists were bourgeoisie themselves. If the
Surrealists sincerely wanted to help the working class they would have
done more than write poems, make movies, and make paintings that were
only accessable to the educated rich who were the only ones who could
decipher much of the symbolism involved in these works anyway.

"A revolution is not a dinner party,
Or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery:
It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle,
So temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.
A revolution is an insurrection,
An act of violence by which one class overthrows another."

my $.02,

clifton

[Lutz van Hasselt]

"C. Endicott" <cend...@u.washington.edu> writes:

>Breton was a fascist and a racist. So it goes. Surrealism was never
>intended to be politically correct; the unconscious itself is not
>politically correct.

>Wastern culture is not *anything*. "Culture" is a myth. There is no
>proletariat, no bourgeois.

That's the original (nihilist) definition of surrealism as stated in the
manifestoes of the 1920s. "The best surrealist action would be to go out and
shoot people in the street at random".
I wouldn't call Breton racist and fascist, however. Most of the Surrealists
later supported radical left politics of some kind, ranging from anarchism
to Stalinism to Trotzkyism. And it was Breton who blamed Dali for his racism
and his fascination for Hitler.

[Daniel C. Boyer]

What is this obsession with "the early surrealists"? Why wonet anyone
on this newsgroup write about surrealism today? Surrealism is still
going on, as anyone who cares at all about the evidence can attest
(i.e., among many other examples, the Surrealist Movement in the
United States, in which I participate, and the Groupe de Paris du
Mouvement Surrealiste, which has been going since its foundation).
Surrealism has been called "the communism of genius." It is
wholeheartedly for revolution. The alleged "contradiction" between
the surrealists being part of the "culture" of Western Civilization --
a context in which they belong only in defiance -- and supporting
proletarian revolution is rubbish which stems from the continued
misidentification of surrealism as an artistic movement. When is this
group going to stop lying about surrealism?

[Lutz van Hasselt]

"Daniel C. Boyer" <dbo...@fas.harvard.edu> writes:

>Lutz van Hasselt wrote:
>Most of the Surrealists
>> later supported radical left politics of some kind, ranging from anarchism
>> to Stalinism to Trotzkyism. And it was Breton who blamed Dali for his racism
>> and his fascination for Hitler.

>This is an absolute distortion of surrealism. The surrealist groups
>have repeatedly denounced Stalin and Stalinism, with which surrealism
>is incompatable.
I have not said the surrealist groups have supported Stalin, they clearly have
not. I was talking about single people, who, Surrealists earlier in their life,
became Stalinists.