From: STUART INMAN <S.Inman-AT-greenwich.ac.uk>
Date:          Tue, 2 Jul 1996 18:25:16 GMT
Subject:       Re: exhibition, further thoughts 


If a wrong idea of Surrealism exists, it has to be up to us to 
correct it. The difficulty is in differentiating between wrong 
information and different interpretations. Not to mention the 
difference between different information and wrong interpretations.

This is one of the reasons that I always resist the notion that 
Surrealism is an art movement, even though I love surrealist art and 
am one of its practitioners. If one insists on Surrealism being an 
art movement, one fails to see the totality of Surrealism. Similarly, 
one can not imagine discussing Surrealism for very long without 
mentioning art.

I have been thinking a bit about the business of defining Surrealism. 
No definition is final. You catch the butterfly and let it go. You 
have to do both. If you do not catch the butterfly you fail to 
understand it, or at least to communicate it. If you do not let it go 
it dies in your hands. That is about it. Breton endlessly defined 
Surrealism, always differently, but also always consistently. He also 
said somewhere that defining Surrealism was a task for grocer's 
assistants.

To define a thing is not to kill it, to define it finally, to set it 
in aspic is to kill it. But to define it in an open way is to pick 
off that horrible mixture of aspic and dust (and formaldahyde) and 
allow it to breathe again. But the metaphor has changed. Whoever 
heard of a butterfly in aspic?

Stuart