The following is a free­form writing exercise written in response to an assignment for Professor Debra Riley Parr, ColumbiaCollege Chicago, Fall 2012.­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­

Surrealism: Where Chance is Romance

Edward Hopper, Compartment C, Car 293 (1938)

To borrow a small phrase from Walter Benjamin’s writings and apply it to my own feeling: “I am inconsolable not to

have known”... the Surrealists. My first encounter with the word ­ surreal ­ was a romantic one, now forming a memory that1

could pop up in a dream ripe for analysis. My mother, a San Francisco expat of the hippie generation, constantly spun Jefferson

Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow at bedtime. I’d fall­fall­fall while Grace Slick told me her druggy bedtime stories, living her own

generation’s version of Surrealism. As a kid I once painted a pair of papier­mache shoes to look like an Edward Hopper painting.

I copied one of Hopper’s solemn, lonely girls sitting in some cafe or maybe a train and unfortunately/fortunately I messed up her

face. She was supposed to be looking down in introspection at her book, but by chance I painted Hopper’s girl glancing out of the

window. By dumb luck I made this girl stare like a surrealist; she looked toward the outside world, hinting at her extension into

it, but remained internal, pensive, perhaps she was only staring at her own reflection. (And for added layering, she will forever be

preserved on my pair of useless paper shoes that must remain inside lest be destroyed.)

1 “...the “Theatre Moderne”, which I am inconsolable not to have known.” Walter Benjamin, The Last Snapshot of theEuropean Intelligentsia, 1929. (http://tinyurl.com/bpwwtsx)

Marcel Duchamp & “The Large Glass” (1915­1923)

She is like Andre Breton at the moment he was inspired to write automatic poetry, looking through a window toward a

man on the street, only to see his image broken in two by window panes. In this moment, staring through layers, Breton doesn’t

see the man, he sees his own perspective of the man, he sees the surreal above the real, the shadow the man doesn’t see that he

casts. And what luck! Breton’s placement next to that window at just the right angle in just the right moment! Happy accidents!

A signal from the surrealist universe waiting dormant until Breton found ambled upon it.2

Here I realize I am enthralled with Breton and perhaps a bit in love with him. Breton’s universe is full up of coincidental

fates and latent meanings. Being alive means being an archaeologist of the hidden, both historian and writer of the future. Like

Marinetti or Tzara, Breton seems a curious contradiction; a leader­liberator, an egalitarian­critic, a poet­revolutionary. Surrealism

too is therefore contradictory, and practicing Surrealism means wishing for access to inaccessible things like the Freudian

unconscious, or the intimacy of dreams. Surrealism is an attempt to bridle the untameable, harnessing chance with rules and

structured games, structure imposed on the un­structurable, all this following in the troublesome human tradition in which we

contradict our best ideas.

A Dadaist may have followed this attitude toward negation, but the Surrealist pushes past contradiction toward

poetry. Like good poets, Surrealists are interested in intoxication, and demand for us to change our vision and dissect our thought.

Working in response to all the nasty rationality that led to a vicious world war, the Surrealists are fascinated with subverting the

2 In Nadja, Breton is fond of strolling through architectures to find marvelous encounters. I am reminded here of my friend(coincidentally named Walker) who now ambles into a footnote in this paper. Walker curates tours of “forgotten” areas of Chicago forthe benefit of anyone who pays. These tours are meant to be loose and unguided; a kind of hosted derive. So Breton might ask: Whathappens when chance experience, or experience in general, becomes a commodity? Would Breton react to Walker as he did to Dali,the sell­out Surrealist?

mind’s logical practices.

This is why the Surrealists are so fascinated by madness and psychosis ­ as Breton describes in the Surrealist

manifesto: “I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their

naiveté has no peer but my own.” Surreal artistic practices take the form of manias (decalcomania, cubomania, graphomania) or3

psychoses (Dali’s paranoiac­critical method) further inducing the madnesses Freud sought to cure. The Surrealists are interested

in the atmospheres where surprise happens, where the marvelous waits ­ in poems, in novels, in paintings, in film ­ as it does in

dreams or walks in Paris . Surrealism is a lifestyle as much as it is an artistic practice. They are interested in liminal spaces ­4

between waking and sleeping, sanity and insanity, mundane and marvelous. They crave the moments where reality escapes into

vaulting, darkened spaces like De Chirico’s, where the ominous can destroy time. Or, perhaps a more literal representation, Dali’s

liquefying clocks.

To be a Surrealist, you crave likeness: Like Lautreamont’s chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a

dissecting table , where a Surrealist’s critical faculties can poke and prod out little livers of meaning between the two objects in5

juxtaposition. Like the montage of a moon cut by clouds and an eyeball cut with a knife, or the faces that emerge from puffs of6

smoke captured on paper, or the uncanny similarity between the bottom half of an exquisite corpse to its top half (ironically, the

rational head). Like Breton describing his poetry with Soupault: “The likeness was on the whole striking. There were similar

faults of construction, the same hesitant manner, and also, in both cases, an illusion of extraordinary verve, much emotion.”

Surrealists find similarity because they are on the lookout for it. Is this the only reason I notice Breton’s similarities to Marinetti,

to Tzara, to myself? Do I see similarities because I have asked myself to look for them?

3 Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). (http://tinyurl.com/38xs5)4 “The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. . . He adopts as his own all theoccupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.” Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, “Crowds” (1869).5 “As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Comte de Lautreamont, LesChants de Maldoror (1868).6 See opening montage of Un Chien Andalou (1929).

Andre Breton, Eyes of Nadja (1928)

Regardless I gain the eyes that Surrealism asks me to find; Like Breton staring at that man through the window, I no

longer see the man, I see my perspective on the man. Next I see my mind at work. Then I see beyond that work (call it a Freudian

mask, dreamwork, or facade if you’d prefer) to the space above reality where I can no longer trust anything I see. And that is

where Surrealism lives ­ in that little rabbit hole where Alice fell ­ beyond perception and reason in the intoxicated dream where

nothing can be trusted and all objects are loaded with latent significances. This is not a pipe, it is a hall of mirrors, and its images

are treacherous. Like Ernst’s biomorphic machines, if they are objects, then they can’t be trusted. If they are people, then they

are mad deviants. Or in my favorite, Oppenheim’s Object/Fur Breakfast (1936) where my mouth rejects what my hand wants to

touch, I don’t know which sense to rely on, if any.

The result of all this madness is awareness. Surrealism is a political revolution played out in aesthetics, a way to

dislocate and relocate subjective and collective vision outside of ideology. Surrealism is a revolutionary romance ­ where the, the

everyday object, the everyday stroll, the everyday game, take on enormous potential. Reality is what you choose to see not what

you are told to see...if you only look in the right place...