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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.
takes an artefact associable with femininity qua gentility, fragility and decoration, and renders it feral. This is not a bearded lady. It does, however, arguably surprise us in an everyday familiar place with many of the questions over gender identity that the bearded lady potentially raises – only deprived of the comforting familiarity of a place in the cheap seats. Notes 1 Salvador Dali, Pensées et anecdotes (Paris: Cherche Midi, 1995), p. 62. 2 My gloss on
Salvador Dalí remarks ( 2013 : 56). For his part, Dalí believed the two figures to be praying over a concealed corpse, their buried baby (Dalí 2013 : 15–20). In turn, the deadening patterns of nineteenth-century European gender roles are manifest in the ‘transhistorical chiasmus’, of Cameron’s gazing women, in their being thrust forth ‘to the life’. Again and again it is woman that is sacrificed before us, or an allegorical figure gendered as female. Notoriously, abnegation was expected of many women. Where she is fertility ( Pomona (1872), May Day (1866)), woman
. 8 Saint Anthony was also known as Anthony of Egypt, Anthony the Abbot, Anthony of the Desert, Anthony the Anchorite and Anthony of Thebes. His temptations have been represented by a range of artists, including Martin Schongauer, Hieronymous Bosch, Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí
was both indebted to Salvador Dalí and consumed by Freudian themes of sexuality. 12 However, Domínguez’s surrealist designation was also understood by some members of his circle to be explicitly related to issues of bourgeois class critique. In June 1936, Domínguez showed the painting Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle (see Plate 3 ), as well as four other paintings, four drawings, and a surrealist object, at the Círculo de bellas artes in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Westerdahl, an ardent Domínguez supporter
moment’. In 1944 Salvador Dalí developed his designs for Leonide Massine’s ballet Mad Tristan: The First Paranoiac Ballet Based on the Eternal Myth of Love and Death (c. 1944) shortly before he worked on the dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). By this stage Dalí was notorious in the USA, as a detailed biographical ‘Close Up’ written by Winthrop Sargeant which appeared in the 24 September 1945 edition of Life demonstrates. This article includes a discussion of the Wagner ballets, including Mad Tristan, where they are described as becoming ‘the sensations
-making, were nevertheless wary of the possibility of making voluntary surrealist film. Early attempts at surrealist cinema, such as Man Ray’s Emak-Bakia (1926) and Germaine Dulac’s Artaud adaptation La Coquille et le clergyman (1928), were deemed failures by the surrealists compared with the rich poetry emanating from genre fare. A new kind of savage cinematic poetry was introduced by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí in their debut short Un chien andalou (1929). Enthusiastically received by surrealists, Un chien andalou realised a script purportedly written with
ignore the essential role of colour, light, sounds, and silence in Gaudí’s work. (Salvador Dalí)10 In 1959, Tapié arranged for a selection of Sōfū’s wood sculptures to be exhibited in Manhattan. Teshigahara decided to accompany his father on this trip, which would also involve a sojourn in Europe. While in New York, he made another 16 mm documentary, José Torres (1959, JP, b&w, 25 min.). Impressed by the US hand-held, photojournalistic style of the times, the film and its subject matter quickly became another experiment with form: attentively observing the life of
in London’s New Burlington Galleries were facilitated by the commercial success at the same space of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 (paintings by Salvador Dalí, Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso, attracting nearly a thousand visits a day). 5 By contrast, an exhibition mounted around Guernica with all profits going towards the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief closed after being seen by a relatively paltry 3,000 visitors. 6 It hit a stronger nerve once transported to the proletarian East End of the capital, with over 15,000 spectators
the Sōgetsu School of Ikebana in 1929. His approach to ikebana was radical, and although it remained fundamentally faithful to many of the traditions associated with Japanese floral art, it was also influenced by his travels through Europe in the 1930s, and his interest in surrealism. After the Second World War, Sōfū developed a strong connection with Catalan art and culture, and he became friends with Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies, and Salvador Dalí (who appears with him in sequences from Hiroshi’s early documentary shorts, Ikebana (1956, JP, 32 min.), and Gaudí