File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1994/avant-garde_14Apr.94, message 56


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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