SURREALISM BEYOND BORDERS“a 44 48 2 CONTENTS FoREWoRD MaxHollein |. Frances Morris THE WORLD IN THE TIME OF THE SURREALISTS. Stephanie DiAlessandro | Matthew Gele THOUGHTS IN TRANSMISSION Stephanie D’Alessandro | Matthew Gale REIMAGINING SURREALISM THROUGH JOURNALS LoriCole MARVELOUS MONTAGE: SURREALISM AND FILM. Kristofer Noheden SURREALISM IN THE AIR Lauren Rosati TUNING IN TO AND OUT OF MODERNIST TRANSMISSIONS Elizabeth Harney 59 60 66 ™ 20 POINTS OF CONVERGENCE Stephanie DiAlessandro | Matthew Gale BUREAU Sean O'Hanlan 1ECHERCHES SURREALISTES, PAR cairo Clore Davies WAIT, MaRTINIGUE, CUBA ‘Annette K Joseph Gabriel ‘OSAKA AND NAGOYA PHOTO CLUBS Jelena Stokovie oy 102 108 16 120 va 28 132 135 Christina Weyl Mexico city Tere Arca ALEPPO Anneka Lenssen cHicaco Abigail Susie ‘A SHOOTING STAR: LOST SURREALISM IN CHINA, KuiyiShen Horizons Stephanie Alessandro | Matthew Gale MAGISCHER REALISMUS, NEUE SACHLICHKEIT, AND SURREALISM IN GERMANY Potrcia Allmer ANTROPOFAGIA AND SURREALISM IN BRAZIL Zita Cristina Nunes SUFISM AND SURREALISM IN TURKEY Sarah-Nee! Smith “SUT WITHIN AND IN THAILAND, Clare Veal 'YOND SURREALISM CATMOLICISM AND SURREALISM, INTHE PHL Patrick D. Flores TRANSLATION: FELICITOUS IN! Joan Kee1“ ue 160 168 m m 76 180 187 188 196 208 /AVEL, SXILE, AND DI Stephanie D’Alessandro | Matthew Gale EVA SULZER'S DOCUMENTARY SURREALISM Rachel Siveri ‘THE EXILES OF EUGENIO F. GRANELL Natalia Ferndndez with José Correa.Vigier JOYCE MANSOUR: BETWEEN TWO DOORS Jennifer Mundy ‘TED JOANS: OVERSEAS SURREALISM Joanra Pawlk EXILE AND THE “AWAKENING OF RACI CONSCIOUSNESS” MingTiampo {THE FANTASY AND FALLACY OF ELSEWHERE Stephanie D'Alessandro | Matthew Gale EXPOSITION SURREALISTE D’OBJETS, PARIS KatiaSowels MARKo RISTIC’S SURREALIST WALL, BELGRADE Sanja Bahun THE ENCHANTERS’ DOMAIN: OCEANIA, THE NORTHWEST COAST, AND NEW YORK Claire Howard POWER AND AGENCY IN OCEANIC ART Mais Nuke UNDER PRESSURE Steghanie D'Alessandro | Matthew Gale DE SCHONE ZAKDOEK Tessel M, Bauduin SEASCAPES AND BLUE LOBSTERS: SURREALISM ON THE COLOMBIAN COAST Mari Clara Bernal PRINCIP SLASTI, 1968 Kezysztof Fialkowski SURREALISM AND THI Partha Mitter LOBAL COLONIAL ORDER 215 26 228 240 252 260 270 200 292 304 308 36 322 336 353 art 378 382 383 CONSTELLATIONS Stephanie DAlessandro | Matthew Gale BEYOND REASON CChinghsin Wa ‘THE WORK OF DREAMS Harper Monigomery Auromarism Fabrice Flahutez BODIES OF DESIRE Shanay Jhaveri THE UNCANNY OF EVERYDAY LIFE Nala Radwan ‘THE POETIC OBJECT Dawn Ades ALTERNATIVE ORDERS Raymond Spiteri VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION Gavin Parkinson COLLECTIVE IDENTITY Christopher Bush INTERNATIONALISM AND UNIVERSALISM. Fie Rentzou Selected Artists Blographies Listofllustrations Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments Contributors Photograph Creditss¥zqvo9 anoaaa nsiwawans THE UNCANNY OF EVERYDAY LIFE NADIA RADWAN Among the traveling paradigms of Surrealism, the notion of the uncanny in relation to everyday life provided fertile ground for many artists. This trope ‘was informed by Sigmund Freud’s conception of das Unheimtiche (the uncanny), that which “was once well known and had long been familiar” but ean induce a sense of disquiet and strangeness.’ Although ‘the uncanny is closely bound to a Central European history of ideas, significantly, it provided impetus for many Surrealists working in locations such as Egypt, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and the United States. Capturing the strangely familiar in every- day existence, but also life's aecidental eoinei- denees, repetitions, and hazards, was particularly Suited to the photographic medium. Beyond its capacity for documentation, photography has the potential to render simultaneously the evanescence of the real and the continuing presentness of what Roland Barthes called “the contingency of what has been," making it responsive to the exigencies of Surrealism. The effects of doubt, surprise, or anxiety provoked by the uncanny are thus enabled by photographs, in which, according to Rosalind ‘Krauss, “we see, with a shock of recognition, the simultaneous effect of displacement and condensa- tion, the very operations of symbol formation, hard ‘at work on the flesh of the real.” Asa point of departure, one could propose that, especially in extra-Parisian contexts, the uneanny ‘was seen as much less a metaphor, in André Breton’s sense (as he wrote in 1987, “interpretive delirium begins only when man, ill-prepared, is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols”), than an experience of daily realities. Indeed, the theme of ‘the uncanny, especially as it was expressed in pho- tographie means, offered artists in Paris and beyond. tool to adhere to the international avant-garde, In contexts where faith and magical practices were deeply entrenched in everyday life, their reevalua- tion through the uncanny also proved an efficient critical tool to engage with modernism. One such context was the milieu of photo- graphers working in Cairo, associated with the Surrealist-oriented group al-Fann wa-I-Hurtiyya, or Art et Liberté (Art and Liberty). In 1940 the Poet Ahmed Rasim visited the Cairo studio of the Armenian photographer Ida Kar and her Egyptian husband, Edmond Belali, whose collaborative works were signed “Idabel.”* In Le journal d’un peintre raté (The Diary of a Failed Painter), Rassim recounted ‘years later how he was struck by the couple’s 231 Idabel (Ida Kar and Edmond Belali), Létreinte (The Embrace), 1940252 Raoul Ubac, Le combat des Penthésilées (The Battle of the Amazons), 1957 photograph of “two majestic columns, of which the capitals were joining like arms in the light, with their flesh continuing to call each other imperiously.™* ‘The work to which Rassim referred suggests an erie, supernaturally lit archaeological site, while its title, L“étreinte (The Embrace) (ig. 251), points toward two lovers passionately holding each other. However, a closer reading of Idabel’s photograph reveals that these architectonic, corporeal elements are, in fact, the ribs of an animal whose flesh is in a state of decomposition. This simulacrum of organic life echoes Freud’s notion of the uneanny as “a dou- ble of living beings which is nonetheless dead,” to quote Krauss, who adds that the “false resemblance” between the copy and the original ean sometimes be operated by the uncanniness of the doll and the automaton’ Using a strategy of dépaysement and its aspect of defamiliarization, L'étreinte evokes the oddness of the familiar and the beloved. Its concom- tance of animate and structured forms resonates with the Sculptures involontaires (Involuntary Seulp- ures) 0f1992 (fig. 265), photographs Brassai took of Salvador Dalt’s selection of tiny objects and seraps elevated to mysterious monuments of the everyday. In its ambiguity, Idabel’s photograph evades the mainstream romantic rhetoric of Egyptian ruins conveyed by many of their contemporaries, whose interest was to support the nationalist, historicist, and folklorist discourse about the country’s phara- onic heritage. Another Cairo-based photographer, the Hungarian Etienne Sved, likewise confronted, Egypt’s archaeological past, creating contempo- rary scenes to illustrate Tristan Tzara’s Egypte face d face (Egypt Face to Fave, 1954).* By mirroring images of past and present, myth and contemporary life, through the association of ancient ruins or objects and scenes of everyday life, a no-man’s-land is brought to the fore. Sved’s photographs of the ‘uneanny propose an alternative to the successful export of Orientalism serving the ethnographic agenda that dominated photography during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to become instead an instrument for interrogating the familiar, A similar process of defamiliarizing ruins can be 26 snonvinaisno2found in Elefsina (Eleusis) (fig, 263), a 1955 photo- graph by the Greek Surrealist poet and psychoan- alyst Andreas Embirikos. In its juxtaposition of ruined antiquity and industrial modernity the image evokes what Hal Foster has called “the displacing of cultural forms by this regime of machine pro- duction” associated with the uneanny.? ‘The disconcerting—and sometimes terrifying — silent judgment of daily objects and of the terrain vague (wasteland) that manifests itself in the uncanny also reveals the idea of a fleeting reality that sug- gests a human presence, Dora Maar’s well-known 1986 photograph Pére Ubu (Father Ubu, fig. 15) associates an anthropomorphic creature (what may. bean armadillo fetus) with the calamitous dictator of Alfred Jarry's satirical play Ubu roi (Ubu the King, 1898)—a favorite antecedent of Surrealism for the Paris group. Here the reptilian body disconcert- ingly evokes the informe (formless), a term coined by the writer and philosopher Georges Bataille in ‘an attempt to negate the preconeeption that “each thing has its proper form." Such a declassifiea- tion was activated by Raoul Ubae’s collaged and solarized Combat des Penthésilées (Battle of the Amazons) of 1937 (fig. 252) and continued into the 1970s and 1980s with the gommages (erasings) by the Iragi-born poet, writer, and critic Abdul Kader El Janabi, who abraded the surface of photographs of iconic femmes fatales as if to reanimate the sub- Jeets’ bodies through a blinding light. Alain Joubert has compared El Janabi’s erasures to the process of decanting a wine to reveal the profound reality of «familiar subject." This idea could equally apply to Nikola Vudo’s Zadrzano bekstvo nadstvarnosti (The Arrested Plight of Surreality) (fig. 253), a 1929 work that became an emblem of the Belgrade Sur- realist Circle.” A double exposure of a woman fac~ ing forward and back, her face obscured by the Process, the image casts doubt as to whether she is an animate or inanimate being—an ambiguity red- olent with uncanniness, or “false resemblance.” ‘The hidden surreality of the everyday was also central to the work of the Prague Surrealist 253 Nikola Vudo, Zadrano bekstvo nadstuarnosti (The Arrested Flight of Surreality), 1929 group, which was founded in 1934 and in which photography played a key role," Z kasemat spénkuz relaisované bésné (From the Strongholds of Sleep: ‘Materialized Poems) (fig. 254), 2 1940 book of Photographs and poems by Jindfich Heisler and ‘Toyen, translated the uneanny into an expression of urgency. Working clandestinely, the two Surrealists risked their lives to produce the underground phototext book, an activity judged dangerous in German-oceupied Prague. With the potential to reveal hidden truths, the luneanny assumed a satirical aspect that was con sidered politically subversive and, at the extreme, labeled “degenerate” by totalitarian regimes, The Egyptian al-Fann wa-I-Hurriyya/Art et Liberté group embraced this deflance by issuing the mani- festo Yahya al-fann al-munhatt/Vive Vart dégénéré (Long Live Degenerate Art) on December 22, 1938 (ig. 44), the title a reference to the Nazis’ mockery of | ‘modernist art in the Entartete “Kunst” (Degenerate “Art”) exhibition held in Munich in 1937." The group related to the uncanny by exploring the hidden,secret, and magical practices of religious and mys- tical life in Egypt. Tne claim to universalism as an aspect of Surrealism was underlined in 1940 by poet and writer Georges Henein (fig. 255), a founding ‘member of the Cairo group: Art has no homeland, no terroir, Chirico is no more Italian than Delvaux is Belgian, than Diego Rivera is Mexican, than Tanguy is French, Max Ernst is German, and ‘Telmisany is Egyptian, All of them take art in the same fraternal enthusiasm against which the church tower or the minaret will barely manage to raise a deri- sory barricade.’ In this essay, Henein stressed the movements transnational essence as a web of international networks that formed an artistic community far beyond the confines of nation or religion."* The group expressed its antifascist position, also formulated by André Breton, as the basis for the founding of the Fédération intemationale de l'art révolution- naire indépendant (known as FIARI, International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art). ‘Thus, groups such as those in Cairo, Prague, and Belgrade used the uncanny to share in destabi- lizing the foundations of Eurocentrie categories of | experience by exposing the discontents of modern life and the estrangement of the modern subject. ‘The exploration of the uncanny through photogra~ phy provided strategies to address the political and social issues of the everyday that were rooted. both locally and internationally. In this regard, itis noteworthy that the Belgrade Cirele’s most important manifesto (1930) concludes by affixing popular saying to a definition of Surrealism: “Surrealism: I'll give you a ducat to smash the plate, to say both itis and itis not, black and white, yes and no." Surrealism can be understood not as a common style but as a form of interrogation, conveying shared concerns and experiences as a means to bypass power structures and nation-building political agendas. Indeed, even though Paris functioned as «center and point of reference forthe movement, Surrealism, with its ability to destabilize official narratives, offered artists, especially those outside Paris, a new path to uphold artistic autonomy and freedom, To this end, photographie strategies of defamiliarization through the uncanny guaranteed « continuing process of interrogating the everyday, with all the threats it endured during the 1920s, 1940s, and beyond, while questioning the hegemonic order of the avant-garde, Notes to this essay appear on page 35 254 Jindgich Heisler and Toyen, Z kasemat spanks relaisované bisné (From the Strongholds of Sleep: Materialized Poems), 1940 a | sNouvnaisNo3255 Georges Henein, Portrait surréaliste de Gulperie Efflatoun (Surrealist Portrait of Gulperie Efflatoun), 1945 256 Ghérasim Luca, page from Le vampire passif/ Vampirul pasiv (The Passive Vampire), 1945 27 Jung Haechang, Inhyéng ii kkum 1 (4 Dolls Dream 1), 1999-4258 Limb Eungsik, Jeongmal iI (Still Life 1), 1949 259 Vilém Reichmann, Hrs dilky (Horrors of War), also known as Broken Caryatid, from the eyele Ranéné mésto (Wounded City), 1948-47260 Fernando Lemos, Intimicade dos Armazéns do Chiado Intimacy of the Chiado Warehouses) 1949-82263 Andreas Embirikos, Elefina (Bleusis), 1958