Franska skáldið Paul Éluard (1895–1952) var einn af helstu fulltrúum súrrealismans á sviði ljóðlistar í Frakklandi. Hann gaf út sín fyrstu ljóð árið 1913 og gekk síðan til liðs við hóp súrrealista í París árið 1919. Verk hans urðu til af brýnni þörf til að endurhugsa stöðu og hlutverk bókmennta í þeim heimi grimmdar, ofbeldis og eyðileggingar sem fylgdi fyrri heimsstyrjöldinni og ásamt öðrum skáldum sinnar kynslóðar fór hann ótroðnar slóðir í leit að nýrri sýn á heiminn og tungumálið. Hann var alla tíð pólitískur í skrifum sínum og í síðari heimsstyrjöld var ljóði hans „Liberté“ varpað úr flugvélum yfir hertekin svæði Frakklands. Í fyrirlestrinum verður fjallað stuttlega um vægi og hlutverk ljóðlistarinnar á fyrstu áratugum súrrealismans í Frakklandi. Rýnt verður í viðtökur og þýðingar á ljóðum nokkurra franskra súrrealista sem íslenskir þýðendur og ljóðskáld spreyttu sig á og gerð grein fyrir umfangi þýðinga, vali og birtingarvettvangi. Að lokum verður staldrað sérstaklega við þýðingar á ljóðum Paul Éluards en að minnsta kosti þrír þýðendur hafa snúið hluta verka hans á íslensku. Þeir eru Jón Óskar, Geir Kristjánsson og Sigurður Pálsson, sem sendi frá sér safn ljóða Éluards undir heitinu Ástin, ljóðlistin og önnur ljóð árið 1995.
The writings of Halldór Laxness played a key role in introducing surrealism in Iceland in the late 1920s, yet his reflections on the movement consist in sporadic remarks from this early period and occasional references to surrealism in his later work. The paper aims to shed light on questions such as: which works of surrealism did Halldór actually read and what did he mean by surrealism?; how should we read his comments on the birth of surrealism in 1922, on the painter André Breton or the origin of dada in Italy?; how does this relate to his reflections on other avant-garde movements, such as futurism, dada and expressionism?; why did Halldór add Marinetti’s name into one of his key works from the 1920 when he revised it in the 1970s?; how does Halldór’s notion of surrealism relate to the works of Danish authors Emil Bønnelycke and Otto Gelsted or the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore?; can Halldór’s surrealism be described as a symptomatic case of provincial avant-gardism?
In examinations of the fluid borders of surrealism in the Icelandic front, the works of the artist Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson — Sjón — appear as prominent reference points. This paper focuses on the novel Rökkurbýsnir (From the Mouth of the Whale) in particular, as, imbued with surrealist aesthetics characteristic of Sjón’s oeuvre, it disintegrates not only the binaries of global and local, the individual and universal, the immanent and transcendent, and the singular and the eternal, but also the dichotomy of mind and body as well as understandings of historicized spatiality and temporality. An investigation into this novel proves to be a task of unveiling the manifestations of the revolutionary nature of surrealism in the Icelandic tradition as the latter comes to terms with its anxieties of influence from the international stage.Setting its inquiry at the heart of the union between global surrealism and Icelandic tradition, this paper explores how Rökkurbýsnir participates in radical reinterpretations of beauty in line with aesthetic tradition even as Sjón paradoxically deviates from it. By looking into the phenomenology of curiosity as a central driving force in the aesthetics of the novel, this paper traces the evolution and amalgamation of concepts such as the sublime, the grotesque, and the surreal in the novel’s sensorial framework. An investigation of the epiphanies described in Rökkurbýsnir thus sheds light onto the work’s commitment towards a participation in ideas of beauty and eternity, its translation of these ideas into the Icelandic tradition, and its consequent archaeology of knowledge expressed in the expeditions of its own main character, Jónas lærði Pálmason.
Much has been written about surrealism’s relationships to place, space and geography, and by emphasising its international dimensions recent scholarship has revised perceptions of the movement as a predominantly French urban phenomenon. In turning away from Paris, however, one fascinating domain has been overlooked: the Zone, the undeveloped, seemingly chaotic no-man’s land just beyond the edges of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city that was home to ragpickers and marginalised communities and economies, as well as the Saint-Ouen flea market treasured by surrealists as a trove of marvellous objects. This Zone was a specific location, but the wider notion of a ‘zone’ is also one that could help us to disturb the shapes of spatial and conceptual configurations for surrealist practice and expand surrealist concepts such as André Breton’s notion of ‘limits not frontiers’ (1936). Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1913 poem ‘Zone’, for example, prefigured surrealist practices by documenting the everyday life of the street, full of fleeting signs and chance meetings, an indeterminate, borderless and mobile area. With the Zone, a border is no longer a line but a territory in its own right, one in which conventional social, economic and intellectual patterns are overturned and formless or collapsing structures are in play. As such, a zone is arguably a defining environment for surrealism’s aspiration to dwell and to think between spaces and concepts in searching for the present but hidden meanings of the world. Focused upon Paris but mindful of international urban zones, this paper will draw upon texts by Breton, Louis Aragon, Gherasim Luca and Vítězslav Nezval and recent scholarship such as Tribillon (2024), but also prioritise the rich evidence of documentary photography, using historic and contemporary photographs of zone spaces by Eugène Atget, Dora Maar, Eli Lotar, Denise Bellon, Alois Nožička and Jan Daňhel.
Jón Óskar þýddi allnokkuð af ljóðum eftir höfunda sem tengdust súrrealistahreyfingunni eða töldust hreinir og klárir súrrealistar. Nægir að nefna í því sambandi menn eins og þá sem kallaðir hafa verið brautryðjendur hreyfingarinnar Apollinaire og Lautréamont. En auk þeirra skáldin: Aragon, Bonnefoy, Char, Eluard, Tzara, Desnos og Prévert. Þýðingar Jóns á ljóðum þessara manna voru yfirleitt fyrstu kynnin sem íslenskir lesendur fengu af þessum skáldum og ljóðlist þeirra. Þýðingar súrrealistanna voru ekki gefnar út sérstaklega heldur birtust þær í tímaritum og í bókum og voru oftar en ekki í slagtogi með þýðingum Jóns Óskars á symbólsku skáldunum, t.d. Rimbaud og Baudelaire. Það er áhugavert að Jón gerir sjaldnast ítarlega grein fyrir súrrealisma eða hefur mikið fyrir því að tengja menn við þá stefnu. Að minnsta kosti ekki með sama hætti og hann ritar um symbólistana. Reyndar virðist afstaða Jóns til súrrealismans hafa verið blendin. Þannig liggur honum ekki gott orð til sumra af aðalmönnum stefnunnar, t.d. gefur hann lengi vel lítið fyrir Aragon – en þýðir engu að síður eftir hann, en reyndar er það frekar seint á þýðingaferlinum. Hér verður farið yfir það hverja hann er að þýða, í hve miklu magni og frá hvaða tíma og á hvaða tíma þær þýðingar fara fram. Eins verður reynt að greina hvað af þessum skáldum hafði áhrif á ljóðagerð Jóns sjálfs.
“Forms are the abstract of social relationships: so, formal analysis is in its own modest way an analysis of power.” – Franco Moretti
Recent art history and theory has focussed on contemporary art’s situatedness and praxis under globalisation (Roberts 2015; Osborne 2018). Art historians and theorists have explored modern art’s historical centres (Paris, Weimar Republic, Soviet Union during the 1920s, and New York after 1945) expanding with the rise of Biennial cultures and art fairs, to become global (Edwards and Day 2013). Art’s ‘respatialization’ since the 1970s shows a move in focus from the imperial centres to the ‘unmarked’ peripheries, which have galvanised the ‘imaginative insertion of the art of the peripheries into the timelines and spaces of the imperialist centre’ (Roberts 2015). This paper will bring together Adorno’s (1967) idea of ‘Verfransung’, the fraying of the boundaries between the art genres, with thinking on a history of women surrealist (adjacent) artists (e.g., Suzanne Césaire, Toyen, Unica Zürn) practicing in Europe and the Caribbean, to recast ‘global art’ by means of its (a)formal innovations and spatiality. Considering how and where this work emerged and how it was shaped by (im)mobility, I will recontextualise global art to show how global resonances within C20 anti- or a-formal art practices register or manifest the unevenness of capitalist modernity and its defining catastrophes: imperialism, fascism, colonialism, extractivism and war. Understanding this work immanent to its historical context and genealogy, and drawing on methods developed in social and feminist art history and aesthetics, the paper will analyze the works through their navigation of spatial, temporal, material and corporeal boundaries in light of art’s globalization.
During the second half of the 20th century, a group of European surrealists exiled in Mexico and formed an artistic community to develop their artistic research and open new paths for the movement. Part of this community was the paradigmatic group of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna and the trio formed by Eva Sulzer, Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon, among others. As a result of the creation of their own artistic sphere and their participation in the already established Mexican artistic circles, they published books, made exhibitions and founded magazines that would become critical for the future of art and literature, both worldwide and continentally. This presentation will delve into the collaborative relation that the Austrian Mexican painter Wolfgang Paalen established with the Peruvian poet César Moro and the points of convergence of their artistic and cultural work, particularly the publication of the six issues of Dyn magazine (1942-1944) in Mexico City and the eight issues of Las Moradas (1947-1949) in Lima. Both publications shared collaborators and translations of texts from Paalen and Moro, but they differ in both aims and scope. Through the analysis of their correspondence, manuscripts and the issues of their periodicals, the aim of this presentation is to reconstruct their mutual influence and the tensions in their work between the global and the regional, art and literature, past and future, ethnography and colonialism, and Europe and Latin America, as well as their common networks and points of view on art, its diffusion and its relevance for the postwar world. This presentation is written in the framework of the doctoral research project entitled “A future to be realized: latitudes of surrealism in Latin America”, which is subscribed to the Lateinamerika Institut (LAI) of Freie Universität Berlin.
Although a growing body of literature has foregrounded the roles of journals and pamphlets in the Surrealist project, little attention has been paid to the printing technologies and manual labour that produced them. Owing to its synonymy with industrial toil, organised labour as well as the ‘intellectual’ and literate working class, presswork symbolised the convergence between leftist theory and praxis. Printing’s reputation as a form of skilled, masculine labour was not lost on the Surrealists, who employed, communicated with and sometimes oversaw printers at work on their publications. This paper will compare the interwar Parisian Surrealists’ and the Chicago Surrealists’ engagement with printers and printing, arguing that these relationships were informed by political orientation as well as the changing gendered and class valences of this labour from the 1920s to the 1970s. The interwar Surrealists worked with several printeries for their collective materials, and their correspondence reveals the financial negotiations and labour processes that underlie these objects. As they represent a transactional relationship between the Surrealists and skilled workers that spanned the movement’s origins through its relationship with the Parti communiste français, an interrogation of this exchange might build upon and nuance studies of Surrealism’s labour critique. Conversely, printing was a source of paid and unpaid labour for many of the Chicago Surrealists. Through their affiliations with the New Left, they became familiar with the new printing techniques of the democratising ‘Mimeo’ and ‘Offset’ Revolutions. When printed media’s salience as a promotional and discursive tool appealed to the 1960s counterculture, the Chicago Surrealist Group was among hundreds of activist communities which employed these processes amidst a technological revolution that shifted printing’s status from a form of masculine, unionised labour to a feminised, de-skilled one. At the heart of my analysis is Surrealism’s global intersection with gender, technology, labour and design.
This presentation seeks to explore how surrealism was practiced in Korea during the Japanese colonial rule (1910-45) through prominent modernist writers such as Yi Sang (1910-1937) and the contributors to the Korean surrealist magazine 34 Literature (samsa munhak; 1934-35). How has surrealism—and its aesthetics of sleep, automatism, and incongruous juxtapositions—been received and adapted in colonial Korea? How is it different from French or Japanese surrealism? This presentation will be divided into two parts: the cultural/historical context and the close reading. First, I will briefly show how surrealism trickled into Korea—and later into the Korean expat communities in Manchuria in the early 1940s—via the Japanese surrealist magazine Poetry and Poetic Theory (Shi to siron; 1928). Reviewing the poet Kim Kirim (1908-?)’s reception of surrealism and the founding of 34 Literature, which Yi Sang was part of, I will give a short overview of surrealist activities on the peninsula. The main analysis of the presentation will focus on Yi Sang and his short story “Wings” (nalgae; 1936) that trouble the figure of the flâneur and the politics of spatial mobility against the backdrop of colonial reality. While it is widely known that surrealism made a splash in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, less is known about how surrealism made its international route into colonial Korea and empowered writers and artists to play and experiment with new representations of reality. I will conclude this presentation by considering the lasting impact of colonial surrealism on postcolonial and postwar South Korean literature in the Cold War period.
This paper reexamines the popular dissemination of surrealism in the United States, both in public and academic spheres, through a new analysis of Salvador Dalí’s Persistence of Memory (1931) and its evolving interpretations in the early 1930s. Contrary to its present-day notoriety, The Persistence of Memory went largely unnoticed when it debuted at the Galerie Pierre Collein 1931. After failing to find a buyer, it was purchased by New York gallerist Julien Levy, who brought it to the U.S. with the aim of increasing its visibility (and certainly growing his investment). By the time Dalí made his first visit to New York in November 1934, he was already renowned as the ‘Spanish leader of the new [surrealist] school’ thanks to Levy’s efforts, and The Persistence of Memory had been purchased and anonymously donated to The Museum of Modern Art. Levy later acknowledged that his goal of popularizing surrealism in the U.S. entailed the erasureof the movement’s political and literary underpinnings. The result was a more superficially fantastical, de-politicized understanding of surrealism that persists to the present. I argue that this sanitized iteration obscures not only the movement’s wider revolutionary objectives, which is clear, but also neglects the subversive content of Persistence of Memory. Dalí himself claimed The Persistence of Memory expressed the malaise of Einsteinian space-time, though this was a retrospective reading from 1935 in a publication, The Conquest of the Irrational, that Levy supported. Based on archival work at MoMA and Julien Levy’s papers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I propose a fresh, psychosexual reinterpretation that positions The Persistence of Memory congruously with other works from the 1929-31 period. I advance that while Persistence of Memory has become now practically a kitsch emblem for surrealism’s commercialization, the work originally served to affront the religious, political, and socialinstitutions that surrealism challenged as part of its revolutionary agenda.
<em>My paper focuses on the shifting meanings of the concept of surrealism in Swedish art criticism and art history writing from the 1930s to the 1970s. Surrealism as both artistic expression and concept plays both a tangible and at the same time hidden role in Swedish art history writing. While international surrealism arouses fascination and interest among both Swedish artists and writers in the early 1930s and its ideals are lived up to and defended by individual agents well into the 20th century, its justification for existence and relevance for the present day are questioned due to a growing social democratic cultural climate where elements of the “un” or “surreal” appear as deviant and disturbing. The paper examines particular texts, of different genres, from different actors with different agendas. These include, for example, poetry written for the Halmstad group’s paintings by Artur Lundkvist and Erik Lindegren; Stellan Mörner’s reflections on surrealism; Gunnar Ekelöf’s introduction to French surrealism; pedagogical explanations or also questioning of surrealism in exhibition catalogues and in magazines such as Konstrevy, Prisma and Spektrum; art criticism around both Swedish and international surrealism in the daily press as well as art historical overviews such as Ragnar von Holten’s Surrealism in Swedish art from 1969, the only overview of surrealism in Swedish art that currently exists. Also addressing the marginalisation of Swedish surrealists due to their immigrant and refugee identity as well as due to their being women solitary artists the analysis situates surrealism as an international movement with universalist ideals in a Swedish socio-cultural and cultural political context. It thus emphasizes the concept’s transnationally shifting identity and shows how artistic expressions and their understanding may take place or be overlooked depending on specific national and historiographical conditions.
In this presentation, I will suggest that several surrealists engage in what I propose to call an “art of psychophany.” In line with what Henry Corbin calls theophany and hierophany, that is manifestations of the divine or the sacred, I intend psychophany to describe a showing – phanein in ancient Greek – of soul, mind, or an interior dimension – psyche – in places where Western modernity tends to believe them to be absent, i.e. practically anywhere other than in humans. My point of departure is André Breton’s 1944 essay on Roberto Matta, in which he asserts that the Chilean artist evinces a “total animism,” predicated on an affective interpretation in imagery of the messages emitted by the interior dimension of nature. Drawing on theories of panpsychism and animism, I proceed to delineate a surrealist theory and art of psychophany through the work of artists including Axel Olson, Leonora Carrington, Wilfredo Lam, Milan Nápravnik, Alan Glass, and Rikki Ducornet.
This paper explores the unique blend of experimentation and subversion in Belgian Surrealism, focusing on writers such as Paul Nougé, Marcel Mariën and Marcel Lecomte. These authors developed original approaches that combined scientific-like inquiry into poetic language with innovative techniques aimed at destabilising conventional language, narrative structures and meaning itself. The “laboratory” aspect involved systematic exploration of poetic forms and cognitive states, often borrowing scientific methods of observation and transformation. Meanwhile, “theft” embodied their straightforward use of collage, parody and detournement avant la lettre, pastiching literary classics, everyday language and objects to expose tensions both material and social and to unsettle bourgeois norms. Through close readings and comparative analysis, this paper examines how Belgian surrealists crafted poetic fragments that were not only literary creations but also conceptual experiments designed to provoke, surprise and reveal underlying relations and contradictions. This distinctive mode of poetic experimentation set Belgian Surrealism apart from its French counterpart, establishing it as a site of radical, playful and politically charged experimentation with ties to communism and anarchism. Such strategies illuminate Belgian Surrealism’s unique contributions to the avant-garde and its enduring influence on twentieth-century poetics, showing how it pushed the boundaries between art, politics and originality.
Can experimental art and thought become a form of revolutionary praxis or even direct action? Or do the written word and the crafted work of art remain just that, inert manifestations of theoretical ideas with negligible power to shape reality? With this larger question in mind, my presentation investigates the radical imagination of the Belgian surrealist and proto-situationist journal Les lèvres nues [Naked lips] (12 issues; 1954–1958), considering the links between the group’s political investment in communism, despite Stalinism, and its development of radical forms of détournement. I will also focus on the remarkable and strange text that was published in the final two issues of the journal, Marcel Mariën’s Théorie de la révolution mondiale immédiate [Theory of Immediate World Revolution], a simultaneously serious and satirical handbook for accomplishing a worldwide communist revolution in a single year. At what point does the pamphleteering and radical rhetoric of Naked Lips cross over from ultraleftist theorizing and imagining to a form of direct-action cultural guerrilla?
Gallery Skruggubúð was run by Medúsa, Iceland’s first surrealist group (1979-1985). The members at its core were Sjón (Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson), Ólafur Jóhann Engilbertsson, Einar Melax, Jóhamar, Matthías S. Magnússon and Þór Eldon. Existing for merely a year (1982-83), the gallery became a center for surrealist activities in Iceland, hosting exhibitions, readings, and film screenings. Taking the operation of Skruggubúð as my starting point, I examine Medúsa’s relationship with international surrealism. The gallery displayed an interesting mixture of international and local artists, including the works of Haifa Zangana, Alfreð Flóki, Ladislav Guderna, Susana Wald, and Ludwig Zeller. Or as Sjón (under the pseudonym Birgitta) described it: “These boys used gallery Skruggubúð to show pictures, all kinds of pictures, by living and dead, big and small, international and domestic, sleeping and awake, here and there, lilac and ruby red, everything came together in this point.” Surveying the history of Skruggubúð offers a way to map out the activities of the Icelandic surrealists, and their relations to international artistic networks, thereby providing new insights into post-war surrealism and its transcultural collaborations. The position of surrealism within the Icelandic cultural field is moreover considered, as the paper addresses the reception of the gallery and surrealist art.
This study explores the innovative use of masks by musician, performer, and composer Björk Guðmundsdóttir as a medium for conveying radical environmental and ecofeminist messages. Unlike traditional anthropomorphic representations common in popular culture, Björk’s deployment of masks transcends conventional carnivalesque practices, emphasizing their role as vehicles for storytelling within climate crisis narratives. Through these performances, Björk not only reinforces her ecofeminist positions but also challenges audiences to reconceptualize their relationship with the natural world, initiating narratives that resonate with current posthuman and ecological concerns. The analysis categorizes Björk’s masking figures into two distinct themes, both historically and stylistically related to surrealist imagery: one group embodies animal and vegetal mimicry, while the other encompasses monstrous genres, including aliens, cyborgs, and chimeras. Ultimately, this study positions Björk’s visual appearance within the broader discourse of surrealism, posthumanism, and environmental feminism, highlighting the potential of visual culture in addressing pressing global issues.