Surrealism, 100 years later, at the Center Pompidou in Paris

If you visit the large jubilee exhibition at Centre Pompidou in Paris (until January 13) on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of surrealism, one gets the impression that surrealism was once a dynamic and progressive artistic style. But it wasn't. It was something completely different, which the exhibition does not deal with at all. Surrealism was indeed a revolutionary project.

Surrealism was an attempt to imagine a completely different world from the one the emerging bourgeoisie was creating at the beginning of the 20th century. Most Surrealists had participated in the First World War, André Breton og louis aragon was, for example, sent to the front as a medical student on the French side, and Max Ernst was an artilleryman in the German army. The senseless trench warfare, in which more than nine million soldiers lost their lives and twice as many were wounded, equipped the Surrealists with an intense hatred for the ideals the warring parties referred to, not least the notion of the fatherland.

Nothing was more ridiculous than the idea of ​​the nation, only the church, the family and wage labor were equally abhorrent to the Surrealists, who bet everything on finding a way out of the nightmare that was capitalist modernization. It was absolutely necessary to find another meaning in life. The already created world was a nightmare, it was necessary to wake up from. As it was formulated in the first issue of the group's journal: «The world is a network of conflicts which, in the eyes of any even slightly enlightened person, exceed the scope of a simple political or social debate. Our time is largely lacking in viewers. But it is impossible for anyone who is not deprived of all insight not to be tempted to calculate the human consequences of an absolutely revolutionary state of affairs.»

Surrealism, contrary to its intention, has gone down in history as precisely art and literature.

The reason why the exhibition at the Pompidou only consists of hundreds of paintings and drawings and a bizarre multimedia installation of Surrealismens manifest , which an AI-animated young Breton reads out, is of course that Surrealism has, against its intention, passed into history as precisely art and literature. Indeed, Breton wrote and continued to insist that Surrealism was not an artistic style or practice: «We have nothing to do with literature, but we are most capable of using it, as necessary, as all other." But it helped just a little.

When we encounter historical surrealism, it is usually in art museums and in books. It says something about the art institution's ability to absorb all the many critical gestures that have been directed at it over the past 200 years, but it also says something about how paltry a concept of revolution we have today. Surrealism should be a central player in any story of the attempt to imagine a revolution in the 20th century, but it rarely is. It is in many ways a bigger political problem than it is an artistic or art historical problem. The revolution needs surrealism.

An enchanting revolution

The Surrealists understood, like few others, that a revolution could not only be a socio-material overhaul, much less one in which the revolutionary process stopped when the ownership of the means of production changed hands. The revolution was not that the workers controlled capitalist production, the surrealists understood that based on their reading of Marx, Bakunin and Charles Fourier, but also Novalis and Rimbaud.

The revolution was also a conscious Surrealism had been transformed into brainstorming in advertising agencies and pop culture shock effects that entertained a narrow-minded bourgeoisie.

oath-like transformation, in which the man who was produced in the many institutions of the bourgeois world would be replaced by a completely new man with completely different desires and new abilities.

If the Surrealists made use of the various artistic media, it was with a view to finding this new man who was present in the margins of bourgeois society. In its waste, the places no one cared about or that good taste frowned upon. There, the other world was virtually present. This is why the surrealists, for example, were so intensely interested in the special state where we are no longer asleep, but are not awake either, perhaps there was something in this strange space – between sleeping and waking – a glimpse of another world, where things connected in a radically different way. It was about getting away from reason and the rationality that never questioned all the 'reterritorializations' that constantly gave meaning to the 'deterritorialization' of capital.

The Soviet Union for the Surrealists

The history of the complicated collaboration between the French Communist Party, other communist parties and then the Surrealists unfortunately shows how little the established labor movement understood what the Surrealists were up to. Already at that time in the mid-1920s, the situation was complicated, not least because of the October Revolution. The revolution in Russia, for many different reasons, including the civil war and the 13 foreign powers fighting against the Bolsheviks' new state, had quickly turned into something quite different from the dismantling of the capitalist social order. The Russian Revolution quickly developed into something monstrous that it was difficult to see as communism's better future. The Surrealists saw this relatively quickly, not least members such as Pierre Naville and Antonin Artaud.

Surrealism should be a central player in any story of the attempt to imagine a revolution in the 20th century.

But as for many others at this time, for the Surrealists the Soviet Union nevertheless represented a first attack on capitalist civilization. The plan was, of course, that many others would come, and that these would go much further and initiate the necessary dismantling of the basic categories of the capitalist mode of production such as profit and wage labor, but also art and literature as activities that were reserved for a few selected individuals. As you know, it didn't work out that way.

Ended up as pop culture

The Surrealists fought in vain against the supremacy and ended up as pop culture. That was the verdict of the situationists in the late 1950s. Surrealism had become part of mainstream culture, its surprising juxtapositions just a tantalizing way to sell new consumer goods.

As Guy Debord coolly explained, Surrealism was still alive and kicking, as was General de Gaulle and the Catholic Church. He could hardly have been more dismissive. Surrealism had been transformed into brainstorming in advertising agencies and pop culture shock effects that entertained a bourgeois bourgeoisie. The surrealists themselves were well aware of this, which is why there were constant breaks in the group and competing surrealist groups emerged. In retrospect, many of those who left often appear as the 'real' surrealists: Antonin Artaud, Pierre Naville, George Bataille, André Masson etc. Not to mention all the women who never officially became members of the group, but were by far the most radial like Claude Cahun.

A new destitutive avant-garde?

This year marks 100 years since the surrealist group was founded in Paris and Breton wrote Surrealismens manifest.

In many ways it is impossible to understand what they were up to. We can of course read the texts, walk roughly the same routes through Paris as they did, but very much is completely different. It is really difficult to take stock of surrealism in 2024. It was a different time.

I mean, can Macron be Friedrich Ebert when he lets the French police crack down on De Gule Veste and Soulèvements de la terre today? Ebert who let proto-fascist Freikorps crush the November Revolution in Germany in 1919.

Is the October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood the Rif Rebellion? Has Wilhelm Freddie become Esben Weile-Kjær? And Marcel Duchamp then Maurizio Cattelan? And what about all the post-fascists, is Meloni Mussolini and Trump then Hitler? The similarities are of course striking, they cannot be avoided, the notion of a threatened ethno-community more than anything else.

Antonin Artaud, Pierre Naville, George Bataille, André Masson and Claude Cahun.

But the difference between the old and the new fascists is also overwhelming. Where interwar fascists were leaders of strong armed mass movements who had a vision of being able to overcome class struggle with racist exclusion, we have far more low key versions with a scattered mass of solitary individuals. These people spend too much time on the internet, who just want to be allowed to be as racist and oppressive to women as many have been so far.

Today, the counter-revolutionaries as well as the revolutionaries seem to have difficulty imagining another world. This is of course why the surrealists are far away. But this is also why we must try to find them again. The Surrealists were one of the most ambitious attempts to develop a revolutionary imagination, to actually make images of another life without ending up with five-year plans and economic programs that consign all those dragging their feet to the Gulag.

When the surrealists ran in and out of the cinema halls in Paris to make a film themselves, and when they wandered the streets, or when they painted pictures and wrote poems, it was to make art a reality, to make it a way of life. Like all the other avant-gardes, artistic as well as political, the Surrealists were iconoclasts. It was about removing the existing world and making it possible for a new one to be created. In it, art would be replaced by a creative activity that uses the world as its material. Everyone should be an artist.

Today, unfortunately, this vision is not even a caricature, but almost incomprehensible. We create images of ourselves 24/7 and get increasingly bored. That is why the new avant-garde is forced to be destitutive. There is no program, no predicates. But lived practice and a different organization already now.

Se https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/agenda/evenement/gGUudFS

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