Chicago Surrealist Group – { feuilleton }

More Surrealist Subversion

It looks like I’m still in the Synchronicity Zone. This PDF of the fourth and final issue of Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion turned up when I was searching for something that had nothing to do with Surrealism in general or the Chicago Surrealist Group in particular; inside there are yet more wolves and mentions of anarchy, although the two aren’t directly connected this time. The fourth number of Arsenal was published in 1989, thirteen years after the third issue, and at 230 pages is the most substantial number of all. Substantial and easily the best of the four, with a wide range of textual and visual material, and less concern with the aesthetic and political arguments of the distant past. There are some impressive collage pieces in this issue, as well as examples of work by painters that were unknown to me which I’ll be following up later.

The editorial tone is generally less belligerent than the earlier issues although Franklin Rosemont is still lobbing verbal grenades at the cultural figures who managed to upset him. As I said in January, you can’t expect much else from a magazine that names itself after a store of weapons. Elsewhere in the issue the writers attempt to compensate once again for André Breton’s dismissal of music as a vehicle for Surrealism although none of the discussion goes very far. The blues and jazz musicians mentioned are all dead ones, and mostly seem to be celebrated for their “liberatory” existence rather than any overtly Surrealist qualities in their music. The attitude seems to be: This music/person is liberatory; Surrealism is liberatory; therefore this music/person is Surrealist. The only reference to the vast ocean of popular music comes with a one-page eulogy to Bob Marley of all people, the safest choice in any discussion of Jamaican music. Reading this you wouldn’t know there was a whole world of deeply weird and very influential dub music out there. I’d argue that there’s more Surrealism in King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown or any number of Lee Perry singles than in the whole of the Marley discography. An opportunity was missed in this issue and the earlier numbers of Arsenal to show the ways in which music—especially the popular variety, not compositions for the concert hall—has been continually Surrealist from the rock’n’roll era to the present day. But this discussion is only a small percentage of the whole journal. If it fails here it leaves an opening for more detailed exploration elsewhere.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Werewolf of Anarchy
• Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion

Ewige Blumenkraft

It’s that occult symbol again…

And it was suddenly all weird and super-freaky, like Godard shooting a Kafka scene: two dead Russians debating with each other, long after they were dead and buried, out of the mouths of a pair of Chicago Irish radicals. The young frontal-lobe-type anarchists in the city were in their first surrealist revival just then and I had been reading some of their stuff and it clicked.

“You’re both wrong,” I said. “Freedom won’t come through Love, and it won’t come through Force. It will come through the Imagination.” I put in all the capital letters and I was so stoned that they got contact-high and heard them, too. Their mouths dropped open and I felt like William Blake telling Tom Paine where it was really at. A Knight of Magic waving my wand and dispersing the shadows of Maya.

Adding to my suspicion that my footsteps are being dogged just now by the Chicago Surrealist Group, that there is a quote from the second chapter of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy. The passage occurs in a lengthy reminiscence by hippy-anarchist Simon Moon in which he remembers the continual arguments of his Chicago-anarchist parents. Having mentioned Illuminatus! in a couple of recent posts I decided to read it again, in part to see what might be thrown up by the very long hiatus since my last encounter. I read the novel rather obsessively from the age of 15 to 17—three times in all, I think—then set it aside while I followed Robert Anton Wilson into his other novels and non-fiction books. Simon Moon doesn’t mention the Chicago group by name—and the Rosemonts and their friends were more Marxists than anarchists—but, ya know… RAW enjoyed his coincidences (or synchronicities, or whatever) so I’ll take this as acausally significant. Will there be more? It’s a big novel so I don’t doubt it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eco calls on Cthulhu
• Going beyond the zero
• 23 Skidoo

Bugs Bunny meets Fantômas in the Aquarium of Love

Pop Surrealism, 1949.

More from the Chicago Surrealists. The discovery of the first item comes via a comment from Paul (thanks!) in the post about Arsenal magazine which directed my attention to Monoskop where there’s another publication, Cultural Correspondence, related to the Chicago Surrealist Group. Cultural Correspondence was a US journal which ran for 14 issues from 1975 to 1981. Searching around for more information revealed an archive of the entire run at Brown University:

A journal born from the collapse of the New Left and hopes for a new beginning of a social movement, but also of left-wing thinking about culture, Cultural Correspondence was in many ways a unique publication.

Its founding editors, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, had both served on the editorial board of the journal Radical America, founded in 1967. Buhle had been the founder of that bi-monthly journal, creating it out of a network of activist-intellectuals in the Students for a Democratic Society; Wagner was officially “Poetry Editor,” but after its shift from Madison, Wisconsin, to the Boston area in 1971, he became a member of an expanded board of editors. Together they taught at the Cambridge-Goddard Graduate School, then Wagner left for Europe and Buhle left the editorial board, moving to Yonkers. An exchange of letters from these locations spawned the notion of a new publication. It was to be the first radical magazine put out by members of a generation that had since childhood watched television and appreciated as well as enjoyed a considerable portion of it, also films and “pulp” literature.

The issue at Monoskop was the penultimate one (numbered 10/11), guest-edited by Franklin Rosemont who took the opportunity to give the readers an exploration of “Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices”. The final issue (numbered 12–14) continued the theme with a Surrealist supplement.

Even without the Surrealist content, Cultural Correspondence is an interesting magazine, closer to the era’s underground magazines than an arts publication, especially in its attention to the underground cartoonists. Given my general antipathy to arts magazines I find this very much in its favour. The Rosemont-edited issue shows a different side of the Chicago group when compared to the more pugnacious Arsenal, with no sign of the scowling ideologues that fill the pages of the Surrealist journal. HP Lovecraft turns up once again (musings about Surrealism from his very last letter), together with Rosemont’s beloved blues musicians. Rosemont also reprints the short essay about pulp fiction by Robert Allerton Parker, Explorers of the Pluriverse, which appeared in the catalogue for First Papers of Surrealism.

Meanwhile, at the Internet Archive there’s Marvellous Freedom, Vigilance of Desire, the exhibition programme for the World Surrealist Exhibition which was staged in Chicago in 1976. Penelope Rosemont refers to this event several times in Surrealist Women so it’s great to be able to see some of the artworks which are only described in brief in the book. Many exhibition catalogues are mere lists of pictures with an essay or two but this one looks like it took the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue as its model, being filled with essays, poems, small illustrations and so on. The early Surrealist exhibitions were never satisfied with scattering artworks around an otherwise empty room, several of them extended their themes into the exhibition space in early manifestations of the installation or environment concept. For the Chicago event the visitor passed through “Sleepwalker’s Hill” into the “Corridor of the Forgotten Future”, which led to the heart of the exhibition and eleven “Domains of Surrealist Vigilance” dedicated to significant figures: Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the Duchess of Towers (from one of Andre Bréton’s favourite films, Peter Ibbetson), Sade’s Juliette, Harpo Marx, T-Bone Slim, Peetie Wheatstraw, Robin Hood, Bugs Bunny, Alfred Jarry’s Doctor Faustroll, Melmoth the Wanderer, and the Surrealists’ favourite master criminal, Fantômas. The imperishable wise-cracking rabbit had already appeared in the pages of Arsenal, as well as on the cover of the first issue of Cultural Correspondence, but this is where he becomes a genuine Surrealist icon.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion