Surrealpolitik

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There were 4 results from your search for keyword(s): 'Surrealism & Dada'.

  1. As Coates had suggested in his own novel of the 1920s, The Eater of Darkness, the limits and limitations of avant-gardism were already recognizable within the extremes of avant-garde experience itself. These limits were in fact essential to movements like Dada, whose adherents vehemently, if playfully, rejected the "religious" notions of artistic autonomy and escapism that Cowley describes as conditions of the movement's death. Movements like Dada -- or like the American little magazines that were aware of their own brief life spans -- were provisional rather than static; they died at the moment their adherents invested in them the kind of faith Cowley describes as the makings of a "personal refuge."...Coates and West understood this effect of discouragement as an imperative, rather than as a flaw or telos within avant-gardism. "To avoid the danger of being solemn," Cowley writes of West, "he used to stick pins into his dearest illusions" (Introduction ii). To do otherwise would signify a decadent adherence to false beliefs.

    Source: Anti-Menckenism: Nathanael West, Robert M. Coates, and the provisional avant-garde, p. 526-527
  2. As...Surrealism ignored the negativity embodied in Dada, being nevertheless hard put to it to institute any positive project, it succeeded only in setting in motion the old ideological mechanism whereby today's partial revolt is turned into tomorrow's official culture.

    Source: A Cavalier History of Surrealism, p. 9
  3. Dada and surrealism are the two currents which mark the end of modern art. They are contemporaries, though only in a relatively conscious manner, of the last great assault of the revolutionary proletarian movement; and the defeat of this movement, which left them imprisoned in the same artistic field whose decrepitude they had announced, is the basic reason for their immobilization. Dadaism and surrealism are at once historically related and opposed to each other. This opposition, which each of them considered to be its most important and radical contribution, reveals the internal inadequacy of their critique, which each developed one-sidedly. Dadaism wanted to suppress art without realizing it; surrealism wanted to realize art without suppressing it. The critical position later elaborated by the Situationists has shown that the suppression and the realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single supersession of art.

    Source: Society of the Spectacle, p. 191
  4. The father of Surrealism was Dada; its mother was an arcade. Dada, when the two first met, was already old. At the end of 1919, Aragon and Breton, out of antipathy to Montparnasse and Montmartre, transferred the site of their meeting with friends to a café in the Passage de l'Opéra. Construction of the Boulevard Haussmann brought about the demise of the Passage de l'Opéra. Louis Aragon devoted 135 pages to this arcade; in the sum of these three digits hides the number nine -- the number of muses who presided as midwives at the birth of Surrealism. These stalwart muses are named Ballhorn, Lenin, Luna, Freud, Mors, Marlitt, and Citroen. A provident reader will make way for them all, as discreetly as possible, wherever they are encountered in the course of these lines. In Paysan de Paris, Aragon conducts as touching a requiem for this arcade as any man has ever conducted for the mother of his son. It is there to be read, but here one should expect no more than a physiology and, to be blunt, an autopsy of these parts of the capital city of Europe, parts that could not be more mysterious or more dead. (See C1,3.) [h°,1]

    Source: The Arcades Project, p. 883