MÉLUSINE XXVIII, 'SURREALISM AS LEGACY: THE AVANT-GARDE AFTER 1945'

Review par Catherine Dufour

Issue XXVIII of the journal Mélusine brings together, with the exception of a few interventions*, the proceedings of the Cerisy Conference of August 2006, whose title it adopts: "Surrealism as Legacy: The Avant-Garde after 1945". Wherever there is legacy, there is ambivalence, as several articles attest. The new post-war avant-gardes (CoBrA, Lettrists, Fluxus, Situationists, etc.), while drawing from the surrealist legacy, want to distinguish themselves from it. Throughout the articles, several recurring themes of confrontation emerge: the relationship to the group, political problems, the relations between art and life. The idea of the "death of art" gradually makes its way. And yet, all these groups, even the most radical, have never ceased to produce...

[ *. Notably those of Gérard Farasse on the relations between Philippe Sollers and André Breton, of Vincent Kaufmann on the Living Theater and the Viennese Actionists, of Yan Ciret on Gil J. Wolman, all three published elsewhere.]

Individual Trajectories: From Legacy to Dissidence

Between "legacy and dissidence," to use Stéphanie Caron's expression ("Between Legacy and Dissidence: Christian Dotremont's Surrealist Heritage"), there exist a thousand nuances. Topor's motto reported by Myriam Boucharenc — "En Topor dans le texte: (addendum to the anthology of black humor)" — is a fine example: neither "adhere, nor abhor" but "gather nectar." One of the central modalities of the notion of heritage being revolt against the father — most often conducted in the name of the father, as psychoanalysis teaches us — it was difficult for the neo-avant-gardists not to define themselves in relation to Breton, who occupies a privileged place in this issue of Mélusine. In Alechinsky's youth, Breton is both fascinating and forbidden. The meeting between the two men, recounted by Michel Sicard, ("Alechinsky, Surrealist on the Margins") is late (1963) but has an initiatory value, the culmination of a quest evoked in Roue libre (1971). Fabien Danesi evokes another marginal figure, that of Enrico Baj ("Enrico Baj and the Nuclear Art Movement") whom the surrealists try to adopt but whom ambivalence toward Breton, expressed on various occasions, keeps at the movement's borders. Conversely, heirs benefit more or less from the father's recognition. The poster artist Dufrêne is disdained (Jérôme Duwa, "L'œuvre à ravir: the Affichistes") but Isou is relatively well treated despite his hysterical will to surpass the father (R. Sabatier, "Isidore Isou: the Problem of Surpassing"): aware that there was no Parisian career without the master's endorsement, he sends him his works very early, dedicates some to him, meets him several times, invites him to Lettrist demonstrations (1947), but at the same time burns to dethrone him and does not hesitate to spit on him. Breton grants him a certain benevolence and co-signs a Defense of Isidore Isou (1950) to protect him from the courts. Bataille, who describes him as a crude character, salutes his genius for megalomania, attested by his Reflections on André Breton which claim to reveal to the master the unconscious foundations of his thought!

Ambivalence again, closer to us, in some colorful personalities: Topor or Arrabal. If Topor maintained affinities with surrealism in his youth, it is his conception of black humor that separates him from Breton. Their only meeting takes place in 1961 at the café La promenade de Vénus: Breton's solemnity horrifies Topor who flees under the pretext... of going to the bathroom, a symbolic place for a fanatic of scatology. For despite his personal relationship with genocide, Topor hates gravity and, hostile to any Bretonian sublimation, is an adept of obscenity. Donning in his Memoirs of an Old Fool the role of an imaginary double who would have inspired the Surrealist Manifestos, he realizes that "the best way to get rid of the father would not be to kill him but to pillage him." From his "hedgerow heritage" disrespectful of the "superior revolt of the spirit," Myriam Boucharenc gives us a delicious anthology that owes to Roussel or Duchamp and traverses the cynical and comical side of black humor. A member of the surrealist group in 1962, Arrabal for his part recognizes in "L'homme panique" in 1963 what he owes to Breton, "sacred oak" and "great magnetizer" (Olivier Penot-Lacassagne, "Arrabal or The Farewell to Surrealism") and all the more so since Breton had appreciated him as a collaborator on issue 3 of La Brèche. But Arrabal muddles the tracks and this praise of Breton is actually a farewell to surrealism. Parodying the first Manifesto, he orients Chance toward generalized Confusion. He denies the Unconscious in favor of a very personal theory of memory and chaos as human specificity. Without guiding line or manifestos, opening his journal to the most heterogeneous influences, Panic expresses itself through heterogeneous texts and practices whose jewel is undoubtedly the "theatrical ceremony" imagined by Arrabal.

More complex is the case of Debord, who was initiated into surrealism unknowingly during urban drifts experimented with in 1953 in the company of his friend Chtchevglov (Boris Donné, "Debord & Chtcheglov, woods & coals"). His imperfect knowledge of surrealism at that time, scholastic and ideological, did not allow him to measure all that these wanderings owed to a surrealism with which Chtchevglov was impregnated, as proven by his writings of the time, his "utopian architectures" with Bretonian echoes or inspired by Julien Gracq. Becoming aware of this misunderstanding at the very moment when he wanted to settle scores with surrealism, Debord denies Chtchevglov and attempts a theoretical "surpassing" of drifts: he refounds psychogeography as science and not as simple reverie. (Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, 1955, Theory of the Drift, 1956). To objective chance and the space of freedom of the surrealist encounter (Nadja), he opposes the experience of separation, alienation and solitude. But Boris Donné judges weak the result of these theoretical artifacts without proven scientificity. Chtchevglov will ultimately have played for Debord the same role as Vaché for Breton and the Letters from Afar of the interned friend recall Artaud's Letters from Rodez to Breton. Eternal recommencement... The article by Yalla Seddiki ("The Lettrists, Les Lèvres nues and Détournements") complements that of Boris Donné by revealing Debord's secret strategy during his Belgian period: to model himself incognito on the Breton myth in Les Lèvres nues (1954-1958) without depriving himself however of denigrating the founder of surrealism. This journal was to ensure the junction between a Brussels surrealism free from Bretonian tutelage (Nougé, Mariën) and the Lettrist International founded in 1952 by Debord, editor of the journal Potlach (1954-1957), also very critical of surrealism, whose certain practices it claimed to "surpass."

Groups at War Against Surrealism

Surrealism as a group obeying a leader provokes clear hostility after 1945. This is why Isou in the years 1961-1963 devotes himself to elaborating an extravagant ethics of the group (Éric Monsinjon, "Lettrism: A New Concept of Group") completed by Maurice Lemaître. Accompanied by rules as codified as they are far-fetched, it aims to be an alternative to the totalitarian functioning of the surrealist group, placed under the sign of parody and provocation. We note in fact that the neo-avant-gardes often reproduce the collective behaviors they condemn. Such is the case with Fluxus, (Bertrand Clavez, "Fluxus and Surrealism, Between Murder of the Father and Historical Repetition"), proclaimed enemy of surrealism and of Breton accused of murdering Dada. Its leader Maciumas nevertheless reproduces the surrealist model identically, succeeding in federating internationally the innumerable movements of the avant-garde thanks to intense work of editing, networks, journals (Fluxus) and demonstrations (Wiesbaden music festival, 1962). Inevitable irony of history: Maciumas who never ceased to denounce surrealism as a fascist organization subject to a despot was rejected by his own movement for his excessive authoritarianism and his obsolete Stalinist references.

Years after Fluxus, Tel Quel and TXT (Philippe Forest, "Artaud bataille encore"/Bénédicte Gorrillot, "The TXT and the Surrealist Heritage") still settle scores with surrealism. Tel Quel uses Artaud and Bataille as war machines at the Cerisy Conference in 1972 to finish with the rehashing of the Breton/Aragon couple, in the name of new energies arising from madness, eroticism and "semantic materialism." Artaud and Bataille, incarnating the return to the great surrealist adventure, serve them to reinvent a Tel Quel 72 very different from Tel Quel 68. Under the influence of the desiring current, the May revolt and the new articulations between Marx and psychoanalysis theorized by Kristeva, the rehabilitated subject emancipates itself from the fashion of Derridean and Althusserian deconstructions of the first Tel Quel. Following the trail of a "phantom issue" of TXT (1969-1993) on surrealism, planned but never published, B. Gorillot reveals that the writers of this journal in turn attack (especially Christian Prigent) the "dogmatic" character of Breton, automatic writing, the religion of the sublime and Unity, the cult of metaphor, disembodied imagery and sentimental conceptions of love. They too like to claim Bataille and Artaud (Éric Clémens). Sometimes close to Tel Quel (C. Prigent's writing), spearhead of the avant-garde, it is to Sollers more than to Breton that they throw down the gauntlet. Proof that surrealism is no longer the referent of the avant-garde since the publication of its last journal in 1969. TXT chooses to remain silent about the surrealists rather than revile them and repudiates the inescapable relationship to modernity. But nothing is so simple! B. Gorrillot lifts the veil on the double life of certain TXT members (Prigent, Verheggen, Clémens) publishing more or less clandestinely surrealist texts!

From Political Contestation to the Death of Art

On the political level, the problematics arising from surrealism are only shaken by the entry into play of Maoism (P. Forest) in the sixties-seventies, at Cerisy in 1972 more precisely. Until that date, it is the pre-war debates that prevail. Dotremont's engagement ("Revolutionary Surrealism") is evoked by a René Passeron nostalgic for the distant years of the end of the Occupation and the Liberation whose combative fervor was only to be found again in May 1968. Stéphanie Caron specifies the contours of this engagement: faithful in the forties to surrealism as an attitude of the spirit, Dotremont found himself after 1945 in contradiction with Breton's neo-mystical positions. But, oh paradox! in doing so he reconnected... with Bretonian surrealism of the thirties, indissociably poetic and political, and Belgian surrealism of the twenties, political and anti-mystical.

Over time, political problematics transform in contact with the idea of the death of art. Emmanuel Rubio ("From Surrealism to the SI, Aesthetics as Heritage") synthesizes this evolution, from Breton to Debord. Eager to found the poetic avant-garde on the Hegelian-Marxist corpus, Breton had to reinterpret Hegel's Aesthetics after Mayakovsky's death, reconnecting with the romantic sources of the young Marx and Engels and restoring subjectivity in revolutionary dynamics. But Isou, impregnated like Breton with Hegelian aesthetics, gave it a completely different interpretation, maintaining the Hegelian idea disavowed by Breton of the necessary disintegration of art (without however inscribing the death of art in his program, limited to "the death of the arts"). We had to wait for Debord for this to become an anti-surrealist slogan with Dadaist reminiscences. The Society of the Spectacle nevertheless maintains encrypted links with surrealism via its underlying Feuerbachian references and recourse to Lefebvre. Revealing subtle affinities between Debord, Vaneigem and the Bataille of the thirties, E. Rubio concludes that the situationists ultimately also reread the Hegelian-Marxist corpus in the sense of reinvesting subjectivity in the revolutionary process. Debord's work then appears as a tribute to the "erotic Hegelianism" of The Peasant of Paris and Mad Love, and the Spectacle as an "inverted reflection of love."

In this domain of relations between art and life, Isou is master of ambiguity. On one side he gives himself figures of a Dada clone through a practice of scandal which, formed in contact with Marxist agitation learned in Romania, goes further than surrealism (R. Sabatier). But on the opposite side, as É. Monsinjon shows, he proclaims the superiority of the arts over life, contrary to Dada and surrealism. Isou's lettrism is indeed the only avant-garde characterized by an absence of "celebration of life outside the domain of culture." E. Monsinjon nevertheless underlines a paradox: Isou's erotology (better than Breton's Mad Love!) and his political economy (anti-Marxist, anti-Trotskyist, based on a strange theory of the Youth Uprising), although both supported by delirious algebraic rationalism, carry an insurrectional dynamic that anticipates the world revolts of the year 1968.

With the situationists at least things are clear. Christophe Bourseiller's article gives the tenor of their radicalism: "Transgress or Disappear: The Situationists Put to the Test of Life." Evoking some rocambolesque episodes of this "ironic revolution," he poses the question: "artists or charlatans?" justified notably by the incredible trajectory of Alexander Trocchi. This friend of Guy Debord, author of a meager literary work, pornographer, exhibitionist drug addict, false preacher, swindler and pimp condemned to prison in the United States, fugitive pursued by the FBI, jumping from trains like a western actor, incarnates a radical libertinage which, also practiced by Lebovici, can be summarized thus: brutal condemnation of the weak (lovers, the jealous, the submissive) in favor of total emancipation, absolute refusal of work (preference for patronage!), piracy of others' works, frequentation of the underground, financial swindling and illegality. In at least one domain, that of refusal of work, Y. Seddiki refers back to surrealism by recalling issue 4 of La Révolution surréaliste, "War on Work"!

The Aesthetic Heritage

Against the grain of the death of art, it is indeed in aesthetic productions that we must go to seek the best of the heritage or "misheritage" (Marie Doga). Isou and his friends boasted of finishing with surrealist art. They are contradicted by the aesthetic practices of the avant-gardes after 1945, all more or less rooted in the surrealist heritage even if they contest it. This is the case with Cobra. M. Sicard analyzes an essential point of divergence with surrealism: spontaneity against automatism. Breton's "pure psychism" and the unconscious give way to intentional materiality. The experimental, linguistic and plastic materialism (Dotremont's "logograms" studied by S. Caron, Alechinsky's forms by M. Sicard) take precedence over the contents of the unconscious. Surrealist influence is nevertheless flagrant. Alechinsky's Journal déplié (1966) evokes Masson and Brauner and draws from surrealist techniques (exquisite corpses). The dream work of his Central Park, or his Astres et désastres (1969), his exploration of "underground mythologies," his labyrinth theme are very close to the surrealists and the expression of desire in the manner of Breton and Sade. With Breton he has in common the theme of waves, eroticized volcanoes (Le Volturno, 1989), etc. If the declared preferences of Enrico Baj, this adept of "derision" and "desublimation" go in 1969 rather to other currents (Jarry, Dada, Cobra, abstract expressionism, Pop Art and New Realists) we recognize in his work an inspiration that goes back to unconscious oneirism, to "mastered chance," to Ernst, to black humor and rebels against geometric abstraction.

Through their fascination with hoardings and waste, the Affichistes (Hains, Villeglé, Dufrêne, Rotella, Jorn) evoke Schwitters or Pollock more than Breton (J. Duwa). And yet these "knackers of the skin of cities" reveal a sensibility akin to that of the great ancestor: the marvelous torn from the streets by wandering, the unconscious in the open air and raw dream, are they not constitutive of the new reality advocated by Aragon? Does not Hains in 1961 describe laceration as "this knotted point of The Peasant of Paris"? Hains and Villeglé (disciple of Baader) pass themselves off as descendants of Dada but their inspiration in fact goes back to the objects of the Ratton gallery. But where does Dufrêne's "crirythme" come from? From surrealist automatism? From the glossolalias of Ball, Brien, Artaud? From abstraction? J. Duwa finally connects it to technical alliteration, inferior to the surrealist nominalism of The Immaculate Conception or to the existential violence of Artaud's cry.

Concerning Fluxus, it is Maciumas himself who enumerates the borrowings from surrealism (B. Clavez): the construction of boxes (at the origin of Fluxkits), objects and poem-objects, work on space, installations, the interaction sought with the spectator (Max Ernst's axe or Duchamp's ropes of 1942). While denying surrealism, Fluxus could not ignore what it owed it: did not Cage's aleatory descend from automatism?

Several articles are devoted to a practice very much in vogue after the war, "détournement," generalized by the situationists (Wolman, Debord) and the Belgian surrealists (Nougé, Scutenaire). But we must not forget that the origin is plagiarism according to Ducasse, a major source of Bretonian surrealism (Y. Seddiki). H. Béhar ("Lautréamont and Them") deepens this notion — advocated by Lautréamont's Poésies copied by Breton at the BN — from a corpus of situationist texts produced between 1956 (Les Lèvres nues) and 1989 (Panégyrique). He concludes that the situationists do not really renew understanding of this practice already used in The Immaculate Conception. We had to wait for Tel Quel (Marcellin Pleynet and Sollers) to perfect understanding of the work of Lautréamont-Ducasse and implement a new science of writing abolishing the ideas of author, book, literary work. Opposing Lautréamont's "textual machine" to surrealist metaphysics or Blanchot's idealism, the members of Tel Quel reread The Songs as a tangible sign of the death of the subject and textual unconscious and the Poésies as "impersonal poetry," "science and science of this science." Lenin and Saussure are articulated via Ducasse! The new materialist reading of Lautréamont by Kristeva and Sollers is the "Trojan horse" intended to counter a still fascinating surrealism and inscribe the new movement at the forefront of the avant-gardes. Which does not prevent the surrealists from putting Tel Quel in its place in the tract "Beau comme beau monde" in 1967.

Jean-Pierre Bobillot addresses the particular question of phonetic poetry ("Does Written Poetry Still Have a Reason to Exist?"). He notes that Breton, adept of "poetry without poems," wanted to change everything into poetry... except syntax, contrary to Apollinaire (consonantic poetry), the futurists (words in freedom) and Tzara (the Dadaist poem). Heidsieck, Dufrêne and Chopin are therefore heirs of Apollinaire more than of Breton. Breton's "pure expression," his automatic lyricism, his mediumism are at the antipodes of the shock of the letter and of a relationship to the world based on a revolutionary passion for the materiality of language and medio-technological supports, which Bretonian spiritualism had no use for.

Ultimate example of the problem of "heritage and poetic misheritage": Marie Doga's article on the poet Denis Roche ("Surrealist Legacy and Rochean Creation") who only used certain surrealist techniques to better remove all meaning from them. His practice of collage (or rather "cut up"), anti-lyrical and producer of nonsense, leads to this "intertext" defined by A. Compagnon as "dustbin of all the refuse of literature." Similarly, the speed of automatism advocated in the 1924 Manifesto is used by Roche not to thwart the traps of the unconscious in favor of a superior meaning but to accumulate violations, errors and imperfections. "L'ozalid," the rotting of writing, "dead letters," the disintegration of poetic matter thwart sublimation and the marvelous (Le Mécrit or Eros énergumène). The subject of Rochean writing is absent and irresponsible, not to celebrate a shamanic opening toward an elsewhere, but on the contrary to affirm a closure, a hermeticism, a chaos, a frustration. End of catharsis: poetry is the place of a crime or a suicide, of a violent death by dismemberment (Preface to the 3 poetic rottings).

It is an article by E. Rubio ("Topology of the Avant-Garde: The Situationist Times") that will provide a pretext for conclusion. It revives the complex "topology of the avant-garde" from a study of the productions of the journal TST (incarnation of a situationist tendency developed by Asger Jorn and Jacqueline de Jong) which takes up the avant-garde torch in 1962 at the moment when Debord and others abandon the project. Throughout his study, E. Rubio tracks behind the incredible diversity of techniques, influences, and anti-surrealist criticism, the part due to Revolutionary Surrealism (Noël Arnaud, issue 1) and its allies from other horizons (Cobra, Max Bucaille, Constant and Jorn) and concerned with picking up the avant-garde thread by distinguishing themselves from both the SI and "orthodox" surrealism after 1947. With issue 3, whose vocation as a vector "of post-surrealist avant-gardes" was manifest, E. Rubio explicates the influences that refer back to the thirties (Matta, Onslow-Ford, Alechinsky) and establishes bridges with the American period of surrealism impregnated with these influences via Ernst or Kiesler in VVV. It would be vain to want to account in a few lines for this tight skein, which finds points of connection with the figure of the spiral (also declined by Cobra) represented by Ubu, Bucaille, Jorn — of the Spirale group in 1949! — or Enrico Baj. E. Rubio quotes Jorn invoking Arp, Ernst, Duchamp against Lemaître in IS issue 5 and signals the affinities that the Nordic art current he claims at this period maintains with the surrealists' "mathematical objects" (1936) photographed by Man Ray. The Möbius strip (dear to Lacan) or the sacred wheel to which TST was to devote an issue (see also Alechinsky's La Roue libre) are part of these imaginary connections.

In short, this article alone is an example of the walks in the labyrinth of influences and counter-influences to which Mélusine invites us. Ambivalence and complexity characterize the surrealist heritage still very much alive after 1945, against a background of revolutionary preoccupations inspired by the pre-war period but gradually soluble in structuralism and Maoism. The richness of productions — despite the haunting theme of the death of art — rooted in dream, détournement, revolt, is undoubtedly the most precious fruit of this heritage.