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SoSe 24: Surrealism: Aesthetics, Politics, Colonialism

Eric de Bruyn

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Surrealism, with Dada and Russian Constructivism, was one of the main European movements of the so-called historical avant-garde, which sought to subvert the conventional norms of art and society. Founded in 1924 with a famous manifesto of André Breton, Surrealism originally consisted of a group of poets and artists gathered in Paris, but it would soon branch out to other parts of the world. The seminar will be devoted to exploring the question ‘What is Surrealism?’; a question which can be given many, sometimes contradictory answers. If André Breton proposed a new emancipatory theory of art based on Freudian psychoanalytic theory, soon divergent views of the meaning of the “Surrealist revolution” (the title of their magazine) would emerge within the group. Beyond such internal schisms within the movement, which centered, for instance, around George Bataille, art history would bring various viewpoints to bear on Surrealism since the 1980s. For instance, during the “post-modernist” period of the 1980s, Surrealism would be rediscovered as a distinctly “counter-modernist” movement that, for instance, rejected conventional notions of “style” or “authorship” and adopted photography as an artistic medium similar to contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman. Feminist scholars have addressed the problematic depiction of women in the movement and, more recently, in light of current scholarship on transculturalism and post-coloniality, Surrealism has not only regained interest for its early critique of French colonialism, but also as a global phenomenon in its own right. We shall, therefore, discuss not only so-called “surrealist ethnography,” but also the conversion of Surrealist practices among, for instance, Caribbean artists and writers. Each session will be devoted to a particular case study (artist or exhibition) or theme (e.g. automatism, chance, marvelous, games) and the readings will consist of source texts (e.g. Aragon, Breton, Dali, Ernst, Leiris, Bataille) and art historical texts. close