Surrealist Revolution

“Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous”by Franklin Rosemont, 2003

I lived in Chicago for 13 years during the 1980s- early '90s and never met Rosemont at Left events – though I might have and didn't know it. So he might be a ghost. This book is about 'post-World War II' surrealism, which still saw itself as revolutionary and inspired by Marxism. Most of it seems written in the 1970s. Here is a taste: “Starting with the abolition of imaginative slavery and a thorough revaluation of all values, surrealism requires the overthrow of the bourgeois/christian order and the elaboration, on stateless communist foundations, of a non-repressive civilization governed by the watchword 'To each according to his/her desire.'” This is a riff off of Marx. I think they evolved towards IWW-style anarcho-communism.

Rosemont tries to write about the ineffable, as surrealism is not a mostly logical movement. It is a severe reaction to capitalist realism and 'normality' – to art schools and the 'art market;' to boring poetry, childish music, conventional wisdom and predictable cinema; to bourgeois conformity, to the confining strictures of capital, state and the church. Rosemont cristens these as aspects of 'miserablism.' He quotes poets Laurtrémont and André Breton frequently. The latter is one of the founders of surrealism who wrote the initial manifesto in 1924 and later joined with Rivera and Trotsky in 1938 to describe the nature of revolutionary art under socialism and before.

The text is a celebration of unschooled and outsider artists. One of the 'methods' Rosemont mentions frequently is 'automatism' – reaching below the conscious mind to create. Letting what is hidden, lurking beneath the surface, dreamlike, to come up and be 'freed.' Unleashing the imagination, the hand, the note, the words, the physical things, the ideas from rational control to combust something new. In a way the surrealists aimed to fully escape from alienation, even within an alienated society. He links automatism to the improvisation of jazz, especially be-bop and free jazz. In his text individual talent sometimes smells of genius, which is a false odor.

The book is a series of articles from Arsenal, Chicago Ink, Surrealist Subversion, The Heartland Journal, Race Traitor and the Black Swan Gallery booklet on the Exhibition. Rosemont discusses artists of post-war surrealism, many totally unknown to standard art aficionados. Many exhibited at the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition at the Black Swan gallery in Chicago, which is now a celebrity restaurant, a typical fate in the capitalist U.S. Among the creators detailed are musicians Joe Jarman and Nicole Mitchell, dancer Alice Farley, artist Gerome Kamrowski, painters Tristan Meinecke, Schlechter Duvall, Shirley Voll, Henry Darger and Parisian Gustave Moreau and poet Samuel Greenberg. I hadn't heard of any of these people, some of whom lived in Chicago, Iowa or Michigan, though I was a fan of surrealism at one time and did read the Arsenal occasionally.

Charlie Parker's surreal jazzing

Rosemont, trying to correct Parisian Breton's tone deafness towards music, especially U.S. jazz, writes a long article praising Charlie Parker, Cecil Taylor, Coltrane and company. He wanted to broaden surrealism's reach into the music world based on be-bop, cool and free jazz improvisation. He does not insult or mention rock or jazz-rock improvisation or even the Chicago blues. He has an article on fellow Chicagoan Dave Roediger's book “Black on White.” The book excoriates 'whiteness' as a social and racial concept, based on the writings of many black writers. Roediger seems to be a friend of his. He's got an article on how humor is an ally of surrealism, as it punctures stupidity and reveals truths. He has references to the liberating role of Bugs Bunny, wolves, hysteria, H.P. Lovecraft, eroticism and aspects of pop culture. Rosemont uses references to left-wing causes and struggles of the times throughout his articles, including the P-9 meat worker's strike in Austin, Minnesota. This is an attempt by Rosemont to incorporate class struggle into surrealism's outsider groove too.

Rosemont crushes down on various prominent art movements, especially from New York critics and art houses. Post-impressionism, pop art, abstract art, conceptual art, John Cage, minimalism – all come in for insults as to their sterility and attempted marketability. He stands against the fascist idea of modern art as 'degenerate art' and 'Art Bolshevism' asserted by the Nazi state in 1938. Here he praises the Dadaists, surrealists, expressionists and other modernist painters denounced by the philistine fascists, who preferred kitsch.

If you are interested in art or the confluence of art and politics, this book might be interesting. Especially if you are an artist of any kind, it might liberate your method. Currently U.S. post-modernist art is mostly concerned with landscapes, decoration, abstract nothings, shock or kitsch. There is no art movement of note anymore, no radical edge trying to outgrow the constrictions of commercial bourgeois culture. As far as proletarian art is concerned, Rosemont comments on poetry, surrealism's lodestone. He asserts that: “Political poetry is poetry derived from politics: the politics always comes first. Surrealism, which has a way of upsetting established convention, reverse the priorities and derives its politics from poetry.” This, he continues, brings Hegel's poetic 'unfettered imagination' to the surface.

Prior blogsport reviews on this subject, use our search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Surrealism – Inside the Magnetic Fields” (P. Rosemont); “surrealism,” “art museum,” “Frida Kahlo” or 'art.'

And I bought it at May Day Books excellent leftish art section!

Red Frog / January 17, 2025