INFRA-BLACK

Recension par Georges Sebbag

December 8, 2014

"Infra-noir", one and multiple / A surrealist group between Bucharest and Paris, 1945-1947, under the direction of Monique Yaari, Peter Lang, Bern, 2014.

http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp=produkt&pk=80035

This work on the surrealists of Bucharest has first the merit of reproducing, in a reduced format it is true, a series of pamphlets or catalogs, sometimes illustrated, mostly written in French 1. To this impressive list summoning Gherasim Luca, Dolfi Trost, Paul Paun (or Paon), Virgil Teodorescu and Gellu Naum, could be added other more substantial books, notably The Passive Vampire by Gherasim Luca and Vision in the Crystal by Trost published in 1945 by Éditions de l'Oubli, also in Bucharest. For whoever examines these texts hostile to literature, these graphies magnetized by chance, these objects turning their back on art, for whoever looks into these surrealist manifestos studded with new concepts, it suddenly appears that surrealism, between January 1945 and May 1947, reached its highest peak neither in Paris nor in New York but in Bucharest.

The work on Infra-noir aims to be exhaustive. In a well-articulated and detailed introduction, Monique Yaari, after having evoked the genesis of the group and the dark parenthesis of the Second World War, draws up a balance sheet of the work of the five surrealists, born, let us recall, between 1910 and 1916, and brings some light on each of the trajectories. She does not hide that despite common manifestos and collective exhibitions, there exists a fracture between the Luca-Trost duo and the Naum-Paun-Teodorescu trio which has long seen in Luca and Trost two incorrigible mystics. It must nevertheless be specified that the Luca-Trost couple will implode in August 1951, at the time of their stay in Israel, however after a promising experience of a mental rendezvous fixed at a precise hour of Sunday March 18 between Breton, Paon, Luca and Trost, respectively located in Paris, Bucharest and in two different places in Israel.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski undertakes a patient, enlightening and direct study of Gherasim Luca's founding writings, particularly The Passive Vampire, which he has moreover translated into English. He recognizes there, in the vein of Nadja or Huysmans, the invincible concern for a testing of the real. He emphasizes the role of objects whose obsessive and magical charge can be verified through Théodore Brauner's photographs, and the incontestable part they take in the tumultuous and disconcerting course of events. Luca, who establishes a redoubling of the object in his practice of the Objectively Offered Object, operates a veritable mutation of the object to the point that one can wonder if he has not succeeded in overcoming what Breton had called the "crisis of the object." One has the feeling of a powerful renewal on essential grounds like invention, passion or formulation. Luca does not deprive himself of affirming that he reinvents love and confronts death without a blow. All his audacities only prolong in his eyes the shaking by which the surrealists have shaken the old carcass of society.

In Dialectics of Dialectics, Luca and Trost intend, through this message addressed to the international surrealist movement, to transform desire into "reality of desire." They specify that surrealism seeks neither to manage the heritage of revolutionary thought nor to occupy the place devolved to the avant-garde. The surrealists never cease to replicate desire. As Fijalkowski notes, they are always in the phase of a "desire to desire." Thus objective love comes to take over from the capital discovery of objective chance.

Fijalkowski, with Amphitrite and The Secret of the Void and the Full, continues his scalpel study of Luca's infra-black texts. We guess, through his minute indications, a whole world pulsating with passions and interrogations.

While she claims to conduct a tight study of two texts by Trost, The Same of the Same and The Pleasure of Floating / Dreams and Deliriums, Françoise Nicol fails to show how the theory of The Same of the Same finds its application in The Pleasure of Floating. She does not see that Trost is exactly in Breton's posture for whom the Manifesto of Surrealism serves as a preface to the images and "little stories" of Poisson soluble. But above all, far from noticing that Trost (at the same time as Luca) completely overturns Freudian theory, she supposes that The Same of the Same "criticizes a part of the Freudian conception of the dream and its method of interpretation." In reality, Trost does not keep a single crumb of Freud. In the wake of the surrealists of the 1920s, he affirms the omnipotence of the manifest dream, invalidates the quest for the latent dream and leaves no more room for Freudian interpretation. Not having understood the theoretical coup de force operated by Luca, Françoise Nicol could not grasp the importance of the subtitle of The Pleasure of Floating which only mimics Freud's study Delirium and Dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva." When he dreams and deliriums, Trost does not float on the debris of the past but on a current scene or a landscape to come. It is thus that to our great astonishment we detect in Pleasure of Floating the young girl and the young woman, two characters who will soon become one in Visible and Invisible and Freely Mechanical: the young girl-woman, the figure and concept that will enrich Trost's intuitions and thoughts.

If the five surrealists of Bucharest, between 1945 and 1947, confront spirit and matter, it is not surprising that Paul Paun is led to revisit in The Animal Spirits the Cartesian microphysical concept of an imponderable and subtle matter. A point that Monique Yaari should have marked more. For her part, Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron correctly situates "Nocturnal Sand," contribution of the "Romanian surrealist group" in the catalog of the famous exhibition "Surrealism in 1947."

In a short essay, Jonathan Eburne questions the strategic part and theoretical content of obscurity among the surrealists of Bucharest. In sum, the Infra-black group confronts in its turn the question of the occultation of surrealism. Eburne relies on the catalog of the exhibition L'INFRA-NOIR, Preliminaries to a super-thaumaturgical intervention in the conquest of the desirable by Luca, Paun and Trost, which includes a text stuffed with forty-five numbered statements in italics (Luca: 1 to 15; Paun: 16 to 30; Trost: 31 to 45), probably the titles of the works presented during this exhibition of September-October 1946. But the text being co-signed by the five surrealists of Bucharest, one can imagine that they all participated in it, with as the only instruction to fill the voids between the statements in italics. "We raise a glass to provoke the flight of its consistency 6, we put a sheet of paper on the table to pierce resistances 7." Such a passage juggling with the full and the void, in the manner moreover of Paul Nougé's photo The Drinkers, does it not dig a form of absence and does it not alert us to the resources proper to shadow and obscurity?

The "super-automatism" or "super-thaumaturgy" indicate as desired that the members of Infra-black do not skimp on the supra. Nevertheless, they are above all conscious of adhering to the infra. Not that they believe themselves subject to an economic and social infrastructure but because all their passionate and intellectual, oneiric and verbal experiences, relative to individuals or objects, unfold on the chaotic ground of the infra-black. And without any recourse to Hegelian dialectics, they want to touch with their finger, blindly if necessary, the shadows and specters in the very obscurity of surrealism.

1 Here is the list: Gherasim Luca and Trost, Dialectics of Dialectics / Message addressed to the international surrealist movement, S / Surrealism, 1945; Gherasim Luca and Trost, Presentation of colored graphies, cubomanias and objects, January 7 – January 28, 1945; Paul Paun, Lovaj Patent, surrealist collection, 1945; Exhibition Gherasim Luca / Paul Pan / Trost, L'INFRA-NOIR, Preliminaries to a super-thaumaturgical intervention in the conquest of the desirable, S / Surrealism, 1946; Gherasim Luca, Amphitrite / Super-thaumaturgical and non-Oedipal movements, Infra-noir, 1947; Gherasim Luca, The Secret of the Void and the Full, Infra-noir, 1947; Paul Paun, The Animal Spirits, Infra-noir, 1947; Paul Paun, The Conspiracy of Silence, Infra-noir, 1947; Trost, The Same of the Same, Infra-noir, 1947; Trost, The Pleasure of Floating / Dreams and Deliriums, Infra-noir, 1947; Virgil Teodorescu, At the Lobe of Salt, Infra-noir, 1947; Virgil Teodorescu, The Provocation, Infra-noir, 1947; Gherasim Luca, Gellu Naum, Paul Paun, Virgil Teodorescu and Trost, Praise of Malombra / Circle of Absolute Love, S / Surrealism, 1947.