International Surrealism: Art, Politics, and the Unconscious

Born in a Europe shattered by war, Surrealism sought, literally, to go “beyond reality.” From Luis Buñuel’s sliced eyeballs to Meret Oppenheim’s sense-bewildering fur-lined teacup, from the transgressive eroticism of Hans Bellmer’s photographs of dolls to the human-animal hybrids that populate the stories of Leonora Carrington, surrealist artists took up a range of strategies (automatism, montage, collaborative compositions, free association) to explore and express the power of the unconscious, uninhibited by the straightjackets of logic and reason. But surrealism inaugurated not simply a revolution in consciousness. Informed by psychoanalysis and Marxism, surrealist artists across the globe—from Martinique to Cuba, Algiers, Egypt, Prague, Colombia, the United States, and beyond—marshaled surrealist poetics in the service of anti-colonial struggle and critiques of the instrumental rationality of the capitalist world. How did surrealists understand artistic expression in relation to liberated subjectivity, both personal and political? How did the movement metabolize and reflect the experience of war, technological development, colonialism, and consumer capitalism, and what can it tell us about the nature of gender, desire, our relationship to the natural world, and artistic practice?

In this class, we’ll examine manifestos, literary works, and cultural artifacts from surrealist artists, as well as texts by the tradition’s major theoretical interlocutors. Beginning with the movement’s origins in 1920s Paris, we’ll examine its diffusion to a wide range of political and cultural contexts over the subsequent four decades. We will pay particular attention to surrealism’s charged relationship to gender, primitivism, and revolutionary and anti-fascist politics, as well as more general questions about reception, canon-formation, and aesthetic interpretation. We will ask: How can the unconscious be expressed artistically? How do dreams inform our everyday experiences? Can surrealist objects change our relationship to the material world? What is the political potency of an art dedicated to expressing “pure thought?” Our syllabus will draw on the work of André Breton, Yvan Goll, Louis Aragorn, Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss, Walter Benjamin, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Suzanne and Aime Césaire, Georges Bataille, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Leonora Carrington, among others.