April 09, 2004
surrealism in Australia#2
I re-read this earlier post on Australian surrealism this morning whilst I was reading Bataille. I was reminded how surrealism was seen as historical and dead in Australia yet Bataille's ideas are alive and well.
Bataille's criticism of Andre Breton's form of surrealism can be applied to Australian surrealism. Bataille argued that for all Breton's talk about fusing life and art in the 1924 "Manifesto of Surrealism," the Surrealists never abandoned the affirmative ideals of aestheticism. As Richard Wolin says, Bataille's criticism was that:
'Despite their vaunted and prodigious bohemianism—their fascination with ruins and shock effects, with the forlorn and abandoned quarters of modern cities; their celebration of the unconscious and the spontaneity of "automatic writing"—the Surrealists never renounced the conformist ideal of the presentable, well-wrought work of art. Turning their backs on the Dadaist notion of "anti-art," the Surrealists, under Breton's austere tutelage, committed the unpardonable: They squandered their initial avant-garde élan in order to become merely another "art movement." '
My judgement is that surrealism in Australia has been interpreted as just another art movement; one that has been more or less linked to the personal vision of James Gleeson:
James Gleeson, Landscape with Anthropomorphic Ambitions, 1985
In these works the psychological mythical concerns are to the fore, whilst the earler emphasis of art addressing social/political concerns---an anti war stance---has disappeared:
James Gleeson, Surreal Landscape with Figures c.1943
The presence of the world's horror disappears in Gleeson's latter works. There is little about filfth and corruption associated with desire and pleasure.This is not a dissident surrealism
As an avant garde art movement that began in the 1930s surrealsim was violently rejected by conservatives as an expression of modernism. It was seen to be too much an expression of the unconscious to be a part of a noble high culture.
Why was that a problem?
Because surrealism rejected rational thought in the creativity process. Thus it was irrational and could not function as a shield of high culture against the commercialism and utilitarianism of the market. Surrealism smelt of vandalism, the break down of values and standards and sexual desire.
Let's not forget the base materialsim of bodies and sexual desire, feces, menstrual blood and cadavers. Bataille in 1930's Australia would have been banned out right.
So surrealism in Australia never filfilled its Bataillian promise of a cannibalised bestiary in which severed limbs and unspeakable horrors were born from the promise of great joy and desire. It avoided tarrying with the negative:--the dark forces of sacrifice, myth, cruelty and violence.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 9, 2004 03:22 PM | TrackBack