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Surrealist sabotage and the war on work is an art-historical study devoted to international surrealism’s critique of wage labour and its demand for non-alienated work between the 1920s and the 1970s. The Introduction and Chapter 1 frame the genealogy of surrealism’s work refusal in relation to its inter-war investment in ultra-left politics, its repudiation of French nationalism, and the early twentieth-century development of sabotage theory in the labour movement. Chapter 2 proposes an interpretation of surrealist automatism in 1920s France as a subversion of disciplined production in the emerging information society and also reperformance of feminised information labour. Chapter 3 is a study of autoeroticism and autonomy in Spanish surrealist Óscar Domínguez’s depictions of women’s work tools, such as the sewing machine and the typewriter, in works of art across media during the 1930s. Chapter 4 provides a historical account of labour activism in Chicago surrealism during the 1960s and 1970s, including an analysis of the Chicago surrealist epistolary exchange with German philosopher Herbert Marcuse. An Epilogue considers the paintings that German surrealist Konrad Klapheck made depicting sewing machines, typewriters, and other tools of information labour during the 1960s, in conjunction with related works by other surrealists such as Giovanna. As a whole, Surrealist sabotage and the war on work demonstrates that international surrealism critiqued wage labour symbolically, theoretically, and politically, through works of art, aesthetics theories, and direct actions meant to effect immediate social intervention.
9 Dada’s Africa bouzdouc zdouc nfoùnfa mbaah nfoùnfa. (Tzara 1975: 87) Black and white A photograph by Man Ray taken in 1921 and titled Black and White, reproduced in 1924 on the cover of Picabia’s journal 391, juxtaposes on a patterned African textile a wooden Baule male ancestor figure from Côte d’Ivoire with a bronze Art Nouveau statuette of a female nude (figure 9.1). They face each other, the African male figure in profile, the European female figure turned threequarters to the camera. They are wearing similar helmet-shaped headdresses. The female figure
10 Limit-bodies DADA est l’enseigne de l’abstraction. Tristan Tzara (1975: 363)1 The lady vanishes In New York in 1921 Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray shot a short film depicting Man Ray shaving the pubic hair of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The ‘first American Dada’, she was a poet, sculptor, shoplifter and performance artist. Her eccentric appearance on the streets of New York, decked out with a coal-scuttle hat and a birdcage necklace, head shaved or dyed, was in itself a Dada event. The film was lost during processing, Duchamp having attempted to
, and dismissive of the return to classical norms, the Dadaists reacted by aggressively attacking images of the normative body through their parodic remake of neo-classical artists (Picabia, Man Ray) or outlandish pastiches of images used ADAMOWICZ 9781526131140 PRINT (4 col).indd 46 31/01/2019 16:05 shooting the classical body 47 3.1 Francis Picabia, La Nuit espagnole (Spanish Night, 1922) 3.2 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Source (1856) ADAMOWICZ 9781526131140 PRINT (4 col).indd 47 31/01/2019 16:05 48 dada bodies to promote sport or body
the American surrealist Man Ray on the lecture-hall screen: some of the earliest representations that surrealists self-consciously constructed for the movement in those early moments of its inauguration. My students and I are discussing psychic automatism for the first time together, and my presentation quotes the key line from André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism : automatic writing ( l’écriture automatique ) expresses the ‘actual functioning of thought’, and moreover, automatism is ‘dictated by
thirteen years. He had become close friends with Max Ernst, Man Ray, Paul Eluard and Georges Braque and in 1936 had met Pablo Picasso and begun his lifelong friendship with him. It was in Paris in June 1937 , at a Surrealist Ball with Ernst, Eluard and Man Ray, that he met an American woman of immense beauty. He later described the sensation of seeing her for the first time as like being struck by lightning. It is evident he was never the same again. The woman’s name was Lee Miller, born 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New
Atget’s photography is modern because it is political. Can we consider Atget modern in the same sense, say, as Picasso, Braque or the Italian futurists? What distinguishes Atget from such quintessential artists of modernity is the desire to be, or the consciousness of being, part of the avant-garde without having to inform the public of his allegiance. In a famous episode cited by Man Ray, when Man Ray asked Atget’s permission to publish his images in La Révolution surréaliste , the latter replied: ‘Do not mention my name. These are simple documents that I make.’ 22
not be happy at home and so seeks a woman friend to distract him, a friend who he will finally abandon in order to go back to his altruistic wife, is doubtless all very moral and edifying but it leaves us completely indifferent. At times the cinematic essence gushes forth unwontedly in some anodyne film, in a slapstick comedy or poverty row serial. Man Ray has said, in a phrase redolent with meaning: ‘the worst films I might have seen, the ones that send me off to sleep, always contain five marvelous minutes, and the best, the most celebrated ones, only have
10 Aestheticising revolution Allan Antliff War is a State activity which does not characterize a transitory and circumscribed period of its action but has been the very essence of its structure for as long as we know during the whole course of exploitation. Alfredo Bonanno1 In August 1914, America’s best-known English-language anarchist journal, Mother Earth, responded to the outbreak of the First World War with a cover illustration by the modernist artist Man Ray. ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Government’ were depicted as two heads of the same beast ripping ‘humanity
respect for men than women’ (1923a: 6).19 Shifting gender categories, linked once again to awareness of the body as commodity, are enacted in two photographs by Man Ray from 1917–18: the photograph of an eggbeater, initially titled L’Homme (a pun on his name and possibly a disguised self-portrait), and the photograph of an assemblage made up of two light reflectors, glass plates and clothes pegs, which he titled La Femme.20 Traditional taxonomies and the distinctions they generate in the act of defining are thus further destabilised by arbitrarily coding an object male