From: is0sls <S.Inman-AT-greenwich.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 20 Apr 94 19:04:34 BST Subject: Definitions of Surrealism The following were translated ancollated by my friend Michael Richardson. I thought that as I was trying to get people to talk about Surrealism it might be a good time to give some of the definitions. SURREALISM;n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which it is proposed to e express - verbally or by any other means - the actual functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control exercised by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral considerations. ENCYCLOPAEDIA:philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in all the disinterested play of thought. It tends toward the ruin once and for all of all psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving the principle problems of life. (Andre Breton 1924) Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the min mind at which life and death, real and imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived contradictorily. It would thus be in vain to seek in surrealist activity any other aim than the hope of determining this point. (Andre Breton 1929) Surrealism is not a new means of expression (...)it means totalliberation of the mind and all that resembles it. Surrealism is not a new poetic form. It is a cry of the mind turning back on itself, and it is determined to break apart from its fetters, even if it must be by material means! (French Surrealist Group 1925) Surrealism is the collective experience of individualism. (Andre Masson 1938) Surrealism can only exist in continual opposition towards the entire world and towards itself, it is a negatoin of the negation directed towards the most inexpressible delirium without, it hardly needs saying, losing one or another aspect of its revolutionary power. (Gherasim Luca 1944) SURREALISM IS THAT WHICH WILL BE (French Surrealist Group 1947) Surrealism is the desperate attempt of poetry toincarnate itself in history. (Octavio Paz 1959) Surrealism is a tornado on the edge of an atmospheric depression where the norms of humanist individualism founder. (Jacques Lacan 1958) There's plenty more, but I thought that would be enough to be going on with. I will try and send a comparatively recent (1985) collective text bny the Surrealist movement entitled "Hermetic Bird" which raises some questions about art, the avant-garde and the purpose of Surrealism, but this might not be for a few days - I have to see a man about a dog... Stuart Inman s.inman-AT-greenwich.ac.uk ------------------
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