Surrealism versus the work ethic

SURREALIST SABOTAGE AND THE WAR ON WORK. BY ABIGAIL SUSIK. (Manchester College, 2021. 296 pages.)

IN A PANTOMIMED SCENE from Charlie Chaplin’s A Girl of Paris (1923), the bon vivant Pierre Revel visits an upscale restaurant’s kitchen to vet the preparation of his meal. Holding an growing older pheasant carcass to his nostrils, a chef affirms its high quality for the “delighted gourmand,” who, in flip, luxuriates in “the spoiled meat odor as greedily as if it got here from a cluster of lilies of the valley.”

This campy vignette opens Ilya Ehrenbourg’s essay “The Surrealists,” translated from the Russian for Partisan Evaluate in 1935. A cultural ambassador to the Parisian intelligentsia who had Stalin’s ear, the critic right here abandons diplomacy to irritate a rising rift between official Communism and the “phosphorescent youths” of the interwar avant-garde. “I’m not fairly positive,” the creator confesses, “whether or not the Parisian ‘Surrealists’ are to be in comparison with the pheasant strung up by the neck or to the wily chef,” however the textual content’s subsequent invective towards André Breton and his circle makes plain Ehrenbourg’s contempt for these would-be revolutionaries and their epicurean model of radicalism.

Instantly frightening this screed was an article by thinker and Surrealist affiliate Ferdinand Alquié, who publicly condemned a Soviet movie’s glorified depiction of a labor commune and pugnaciously denounced a “wind of cretinism” blowing from Moscow. Responding in sort, Ehrenbourg’s “The Surrealists” rebuked the artists as trifling libertines, as keen on “‘revolution’ as they’re of cocktails and sexual perversions.” Whereas posturing as “champions of a proletarian purity,” he costs, they “may have nothing to do with work . . . They’re too busy finding out pederasty and desires,” with assist from “their inheritances or their wives’ dowries.” The obloquy escalated to blows when Breton encountered Ehrenbourg in Montparnasse. Shortly thereafter, Breton’s faction decisively broke with the French Communist Get together (PCF), repudiating, in a collectively written tract, not solely the “ultra-conformist” socialist state below Stalin, but additionally the “wretched merchandise of ‘proletarian artwork’ and ‘Socialist realism,’” which had been formally instated because the USSR’s cultural coverage in 1934.

This sensational battle is recounted by artwork historian Abigail Susik in her latest guide Surrealist Sabotage and the Struggle on Work. Taking the amorphous if persistent “anti-work place” of Surrealist artists in interwar Europe and postwar United States as its purview, Susik’s account considers symbolic, rhetorical, and “parapolitical” manifestations of sabotage within the writing and automatist practices of the Parisian Surrealists, the work and sculpture of Canary Islander and late-coming Bretonian Óscar Domínguez, and, throughout the Atlantic, the protest performances and exhibitions of the Chicago Surrealists within the Nineteen Sixties. The guide interprets these creative interventions alongside contemporaneous political actions and materials cultures, with explicit consideration paid to a shifting gendered division of labor. Susik’s dense and cautious prose bears the burden of assiduous background analysis, and her pluralist strategy to social historical past ends in engrossing formal exegeses. However the guide’s surfeit of bibliographic and contextual element tends to obscure artificial conclusions round artwork’s relationship to organized anti-capitalist politics, a subject that was urgently negotiated within the Thirties and the late Nineteen Sixties.

The interwar Surrealists’ “GUERRE AU TRAVAIL,” as they declared on the quilt of a 1925 situation of the journal La Révolution surréaliste, drew on eclectic supply materials, equivalent to utopian socialism, Paul LaFargue’s 1883 treatise on laziness, Dada’s anti-utilitarian rhetorics, contemporaneous discourses on sabotage, and the French labor strikes that received the eight-hour day in 1919. Susik’s first chapter presents a “family tree” of those references, elaborating their impression on Breton’s manifestos and different texts printed within the group’s journals. Of explicit notice is trade-unionist-turned-communist André Thirion’s 1929 essay “Down with work!,” which, alongside Alquié’s provocation, stoked pressure between the Surrealists on the one hand and the PCF and Moscow on the opposite. Susik relays Thirion’s critique of communist journalists who, per Susik, “revell[ed] in hyperbolic reward of the advantage of labor and the the Aristocracy of employees,” and individually notes that the Surrealists disparaged comparable results in depictions of labor in nineteenth-century French realist portray. Right here and elsewhere, Susik frames the Surrealists’ anti-work politics when it comes to antagonism towards cultural manufacturing that they see as venerating a piece ethic. In Susik’s account, the Surrealists conceived of labor as an alienating and dehumanizing facet of social life, however she leaves unclear whether or not this attitude additionally grasped labor’s structural position as the idea of capitalism, a traditionally particular mode of manufacturing whose contingency was uncovered, within the Nineteen Twenties and 30s, by the specter of revolution on a world scale.

Susik’s second chapter interprets computerized writing on the Bureau for Surrealist Analysis within the Nineteen Twenties as a sort of “symbolic sabotage.” She begins with the mythos constructed round automatism by way of staged pictures of Simone Breton at a typewriter, transcribing a stream-of-consciousness dictation from one of many motion’s many illustrious male artists who encompass her. With explicit consideration to the favored trope of the dame dactylographe, Susik weaves a surprising tapestry of cultural meanings related to girls stenographers of the period, which had seen a sudden feminization of secretarial work after the Nice Struggle’s mobilization of males to the entrance. Susik traces the gender politics of automatism by way of what she herself characterizes as a “heady set” of cultural artifacts (amanuensis manuals, nationalist propaganda, foxtrot and vaudeville music, Ouija board ads, and pulp erotica, to call a couple of). Representing automatism by way of “the picture of a labouring new girl,” male Surrealists, Susik claims, “recognized with, projected onto, and emblematised not solely the extra acquainted tropes of the feminine spiritualist medium and the incarcerated woman hysteric,” but additionally the “fetishised stereotype of the sexualised secretary.” By “repeating, re-signifying and re-performing the trimmings of gendered work efficiency,” Surrealist automatism turns into a “instrument for liberation” in a position to “unfetter subjection of various varieties.” Susik’s comparability of automatist practices to the “subversion by way of compliance” ways of work-to-rule industrial sabotage is intriguing, however its implications are obscure. With out contemplating key variations of their contexts and stakes, it turns into tough to bridge the hole between aesthetic “methods of resistance” and the sort of organized motion that resulted within the discount of the working day.

Simply probably the most convulsive of Susik’s case research is her examination of “autonomy and autoeroticism” within the Thirties artwork of Óscar Domínguez. In his Dalíesque 1934–5 portray of an “electro-sexual stitching machine” and associated works, the stenographer’s typewriter is supplanted by one other gendered equipment and its personal spectrum of historic associations. Susik once more wields a dizzying array of creative and vernacular references, from a remarkably comparable Joseph Cornell collage and Isidore Ducasse’s proverbial “probability encounter” on an working desk to early vibrator advertising schemes and the scandalous 1933 Papin Affair. In a trial that captivated public creativeness, two home servants—sisters who had been probably incestuous—confessed to brutally murdering their employers with devices of their labor: kitchen knives and a water jug. The case piqued the curiosity of not solely the Surrealists but additionally Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Genet, whose 1947 play The Maids (1947) was impressed by it.

In Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle, Susik describes, “the stitching machine and its operator fold into each other in a metonymic amalgam of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic transformation.” The contraption’s presser foot (pied de biche) turns into an precise doe’s hoof, and a “thread” (le fil) of crimson fluid funnels onto female flesh (la fille). The scene takes on unproductive and onanistic connotations, Susik contends, in mild of moralizing medical discourses that instructed girls working bipedal machines had been susceptible to involuntary orgasms, and that stitching machine work broken their reproductive well being. “In the end,” Susik persuasively argues, “girls’s supposed autoerotic tendencies in machinic work . . . struck a nerve relating to the disturbingly shut ties shared between sexual pleasure, labour productiveness, and the manufacturing of human capital with the promise of future labour output.” Understanding the partially obscured, tongue-like protrusion in Domínguez’s portray as a displaced “hypertrophic clitoris,” Susik precludes any backyard selection studying of its perforated, prostrate torso as a fetishistically violated feminine physique. As an alternative, two palettes held aloft by the equipment’s horizontal “arm” activate one other valence of the sanguine paint trickling alongside the determine’s again, bringing the work of artmaking itself into focus. In eliding operator with product, Susik suggests, the portray affords a self-referential commentary that demonstrates a “uniquely surrealist strategy to the issue of the artist as a producer.”

To many readers, Susik’s phrasing will recall Walter Benjamin’s contemporaneous “The Creator as Producer,” written for the Institute for the Examine of Fascism in Paris and unpublished within the thinker’s lifetime. Whereas Benjamin’s lecture purportedly went undelivered as Domínguez started his portray in 1934, the Soviet Writers’ Congress publicly debated the “duties of proletarian artwork,” finally mandating Socialist Realism because the formally sanctioned model of the USSR. The next 12 months in Paris, the Worldwide Congress of Writers for the Protection of Tradition, which occasioned the ultimate break between Breton and Moscow, wrangled with the notion of cultural freedom in mild of fascism’s rise. In Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle, Susik reads an implicit confrontation between Surrealism and Socialist realism, seeing in Domínguez’s work “a metaphorical retort to the PCF’s demand that Surrealism abandon its dedication to the non-instrumentalized murals in favor of sensible revolutionary propaganda.” Breton’s insistence on “non-illustrative and non-prescriptive revolutionary artwork,” prematurely of a 1938 manifesto cowritten with Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky in Mexico, was based mostly on the premise that earlier than communism is realized, a “counterpedagogy” is critical to facilitate the potential of proletarian arts. For Susik, the accessibility and indeterminacy afforded by Domínguez’s computerized strategy of decalcomania, wherein ink pressed between two surfaces ends in adventitious patterns, exemplified such a apply.

In a considerably abrupt chronological and geographical leap reduce, Susik’s remaining chapter addresses the publications and protests of artists and political agitators who assembled round Franklin and Penelope Rosemont in Nineteen Sixties Chicago. The group availed themselves of artwork’s polemical potential in direct response to up to date occasions, together with William Rubin’s exhibition “Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage.” Having traveled from New York’s Museum of Trendy Artwork to the Artwork Institute of Chicago in fall 1968, the present met with disruptive, absurdist performances within the museum’s galleries and a counter-exhibition organized by Robert Inexperienced on the Gallery Bugs Bunny. Because of the artists’ shut ties to the Industrial Staff of the World, their relationship to sabotage is probably the most concrete among the many guide’s examples. The identical mechanical information that Inexperienced put to work in damaging berry choosing machines throughout a employees’ strike in 1964, Susik notes, generated the mechanomorphic assemblages he exhibited at Gallery Bugs Bunny. The group’s self-professed “Wobbly anarcho-Freudianism,” particularly vis-a-vis New Left uprisings just like the one which coalesced across the 1968 Democratic Nationwide Conference, additionally drew them to the theories of Frankfurt Faculty émigré Herbert Marcuse. Susik paperwork an animated, ongoing change between artists and thinker on the political capacities of Surrealism.

In the end, Surrealist Sabotage presents anti-work aesthetics as an enchanting and enduring thematic in Surrealist manufacturing, but the political stakes of this thematic stay elusive. One motive lies within the guide’s tendency towards diffuse and evenhanded therapy of wide-ranging supply supplies, at occasions deflecting vital nuances and contradictions amongst and inside them. Historic tensions inside to Surrealism are sidelined, together with political disagreements between Breton and different interwar Surrealist-communists like Aragon and Bataille (the latter as soon as colorfully denounced Breton’s camp as “too many fucking idealists”). Furthermore, the complexities of Soviet artwork’s evolving orientation towards labor—inextricable, on the time, from the unprecedented problem of transitioning to a classless society, regardless of financial underdevelopment and imperialist incursions—are all however elided. Socialist artwork turns into one thing of a straw man, lowered to a wholesale celebration of labor for labor’s sake. However, Susik succeeds in eliciting tantalizing frictions across the relation of avant-garde actions to leftist politics in her research of the Surrealists’ makes an attempt to “reconcile their revolution of the thoughts with the Marxist name for a proletarian overthrow.” We must always proceed this challenge with vigilance—not solely by way of historic research, however in in the present day’s revived militancy amongst artwork employees, whose institutional employers liberally promote rhetorics of “resistance” merely for his or her connotational frisson. Renegotiating our relationship to labor calls for a materialist problem to this doublespeak, but additionally collective technique—and onerous work.

— Kaegan Sparks