Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields - Softcover

Rosemont, Penelope

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872867684 ISBN 13: 9780872867680

Verlag: City Lights Publishers, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A series of personal and historical encounters with surrealism from one of its foremost practitioners in the United States.

"Penelope Rosemont has given us, better than anyone else in the English language, a marvelous, meticulous exploration of the surrealist experience, in all its infinite variety."—Gerome Kamrowski, American Surrealist Painter

One of the hallmarks of Surrealism is the encounter, often by chance, with a key person, place, or object through a trajectory no one could have predicted. Penelope Rosemont draws on a lifetime of such experiences in her collection of essays, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. From her youthful forays as a radical student in Chicago to her pivotal meeting with André Breton and the Surrealist Movement in Paris, Rosemont—one of the movement's leading exponents in the United States—documents her unending search for the Marvelous.

Surrealism finds her rubbing shoulders with some of the movement's most important visual artists, such as Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Mimi Parent, and Toyen; discussing politics and spectacle with Guy Debord; and crossing paths with poet Ted Joans and outsider artist Lee Godie. The book also includes scholarly investigations into American radicals like George Francis Train and Mary MacLane, the myth of the Golden Goose, and Dada precursor Emmy Hennings.

Praise for Surrealism:

"Rosemont is not delivering dry abstractions, as so many academic 'specialists,' but telling us about warm and exciting human encounters, illuminated by the subversive spirit of Permanent Enchantment."—Michael Löwy, author of Ecosocialism

"This compelling and well-drawn book lets us see the adventures, inspirations, and relationships that have shaped Penelope Rosemont's art and rebellion."—David Roediger, author of Class, Race, and Marxism

"The broad sampling of essays included here offer a compelling entry point for curious readers and an essential compendium for surrealist practitioners."—Abigail Susik, professor of art history, Willamette University

"Rosemont's welcome memoir has a double virtue, as testament to the enduring radiance of Surrealism, and as a memento to the Sixties, revealing a sweetly beating wonderment at the heart of that absurdly maligned decade."—Jed Rasula, author of Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century

"Artist, historian, and social activist, Rosemont writes from the inside out. Like a rare, hybrid flower growing out of the earth, she complicates, expands, and opens the strange and beautiful meadow where Surrealism continues to live and thrive.”—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk

"In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Penelope Rosemont, long a keeper of surrealism's revolutionary flame, shows how a penetrating look into the past can liberate the future."—Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter

"Rosemont recreates the feverish antics and immediate reception her close-knit, sleep-deprived, beat-attired squad find in the established, moray-breaking Parisian and international surrealists. Revolution is here, between the covers."—Gillian Conoley, author of A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems and translator of Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

One of the very few Americans welcomed into the Surrealist Movement in Paris by André Breton himself, Penelope Rosemont is a poet, essayist, and visual artist. In the 1960s, in addition to being members of the Industrial Workers of the World and Students for a Democratic Society, she and her late husband Franklin Rosemont co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group, which published the magazine Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and the book imprint Black Swan Press. In the 1980s, she became one of the directors of Chicago’s historic left-wing press Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company. She has co-edited several surrealist publications, including Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination (City Lights 1982) and The Forecast is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States (Black Swan 1997), and is the editor of the landmark collection Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (Texas 1998). Her writings include two poetry collections Athanor (Black Swan 1971) and Beware of the Ice (Surrealist Editions 1992), the essay collection Surrealist Experiences (Black Swan 1999), and the memoir Dreams & Everyday Life (Charles Kerr 2008). She has participated in many international exhibitions of surrealism.

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Chapter Three

Paris Days – Winter to Spring

Our counterculture bookshop group in general had been thinking more and more about a cultural critique, about the synthesis of An- thropology, Freud, and Marxism that for us centered around surreal- ism. Herbert Marcuse’s work Eros and Civilization and its discussion of Freud was important to us, especially his concept of surplus re- pression. There has been a concerted attack on Freud, an attempt to discredit Freud and especially discredit the idea of the repressiveness of civilization. The Right sees this not altogether incorrectly as the basis of the ‘60s radicalism. After all aren’t we the freest people imag- inable? We have the freedom to buy anything we want. What else is freedom? The entire concept of the repressiveness of society has been dismissed. A mistake.

By December 1965, Franklin and I thought IWW efforts were slowing down and were eager to go to Paris. Robert Green and Lester Doré were already traveling there and sending back reports. Lester sent Provo and Revo literature from Amsterdam and wrote that there was a tremendous youth scene. Maurice Nadeau’s History of Surreal- ism had just come out in English and we read with enthusiasm, “the surrealist state of mind or, better still surrealist activity is eternal. Understood as a certain tendency, not to transcend but to penetrate reality, to ‘arrive at an ever more precise and at the same time ever more passionate apprehension of the tangible world.’” I read Nadja: a mysterious and sensuous tribute to a free spirited woman. “Who am I?...perhaps everything amounts to knowing who or what I ‘haunt,’” Breton had written. Fascinated by the idea of wandering the streets of Paris directed by chance alone. What would André Breton be like, I wondered?

First, we planned to go to London and visit the anarchist Free- dom Press there. We expected to be gone six months or more, spend- ing most of the time in London, maybe a week in Paris. Only a week in Paris because we didn’t know anyone in Paris that we could stay with and felt our French needed a lot of work. Further, we were shy about meeting André Breton. We were just kids; we hadn’t really done anything we considered significant yet. But drawn to surre- alism, we wanted to go and see for ourselves what was happening. What would the surrealists be doing, thinking, would we be able to meet them? Would we be able to meet Breton? He was nearly sev- enty, but still living at 42 Rue Fontaine where he had lived when he wrote Nadja. We wondered, would we be able to see the famous 42 Rue Fontaine?

When we left it was indeed dismal days for the bookshop; Soli- darity Bookshop was in storage, driven out of 713 Armitage by irate neighbors, the school board, police, red squad, etc. Our tolerant landlord, Jerry the hairdresser, was visited by the FBI and he worried his Beauty Shop business would suffer. We were determined, howev- er, not to give up. Tor Faegre and Bernard Marszalek were going to search for a new store front. Larry and Dotty DeCoster would soon arrive on the scene. At Union Station we boarded the train for New York. From there our plane left for London.

New York, December 1965

During our brief stop in New York we met Nicolas Calas at his apart- ment. Probably the tallest surrealist, Calas was close to seven feet. From his coffee table I picked up a copy of the surrealist journal La Brèche; in it I found the names Franklin Rosemont and Larry DeCoster. Their friend Claude Tarnaud had sent a letter to Robert Benayoun in Paris, describing his meeting with them. The letter had been published two years ago, in 1963. What a surprise, we were astonished, it seemed a remarkable sign.

We left and strolled randomly through the streets of New York unmindful of the raging blizzard about us. We came upon a man standing on a corner in the snow near Rockefeller Center, but stand- ing there so rigid and so tall, I thought he was a statue, wearing a long cape that flowed in the wind, a Viking helmet, shoulders and beard frosted over with snow. Even up close I couldn’t tell if he was alive. So I said, “Who are you?”

“I am God!” came a deep, booming voice with long pauses be- tween words, I had to smile I was not expecting to run into a god standing on a street corner in a Manhattan snow storm, “but people call me Moondog.”

“What’s that you’re carrying?” said I.

“Music, music that I wrote. Do you want to buy some?” Well, it turns out this was Moondog, a remnant of the old beat scene gone practically catatonic on a street corner.

Then to the airport and on to our BOAC plane, this was our first flight, first time up in the air, but I wasn’t frightened, I was elated because of my desire to see the Earth from the air, because of my excitement of going, going across the ocean, going to England, going to France, going on a great adventure, doing it together with my lover.

Leaving just before Christmas the plane was not crowded, it was a long flight, perhaps eight hours; the plane was so empty we stretched out, lying down over three seats and slept a bit. Mostly we enjoyed being in cloudland and staring down at the gray endless ocean and dreaming of what could be awaiting us on the other side of the vast wilderness of water.

Our Adventures at Heathrow Airport

At Heathrow Airport in London, we got in line, we were dressed in simple beatnik style, black turtleneck shirts and jeans. Franklin was wearing his black leather jacket; I was wearing a fringed black tweed shawl Franklin’s mother made for me; it made me look spectacularly countercultural. We waited in line impatiently to get through cus- toms. Finally, it was our turn; the agent asked us “How long are you planning to stay?”

“Three to six months.”

“How much luggage have you got?” “Four pieces.”

“Rather a lot of luggage, don’t you think?” He commented and asked, “How much money have you got?”

“A thousand dollars.”

“What are your occupations?” Franklin answered, “Musician.”

“Mmm,” said the agent our first clear indication of hostility. “We’ve rather enough musicians here already! What about the draft?”

Franklin answered, “I’ve got a student deferment.”

Agent, “Well, you can’t very well be a student and be here at the same time, can you? You can’t do it in this country at least. I think you are trying to avoid the draft, trying to emigrate to our country.”

We insisted this was not the case. It didn’t work. “We’re going to send you back on the next plane.”

“Wait,” I interrupted, “I want to appeal, I want to see someone else about this.”

“Well, there’s no one else to see tonight, we’re going to keep you in detention overnight and then back you go.”

Very dejected, we were shunted off to overnight detention in some cement-block rooms that looked like motel rooms but with no windows, and were locked in for the night. We weren’t the only ones; there were quite a few people from Pakistan who were likewise enjoying the hospitality of Heathrow.

In the morning, however, we were ready with our arguments, these would probably have fallen on deaf ears except we had pur- chased only a one-way ticket and had come on BOAC, the British state-owned airline. Therefore, because of international agreements, they would have to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: City Lights Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0872867684
• ISBN 13: 9780872867680
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 206
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar