Surrealism is widely thought of as an artistic movement that flourished in Europe between the two world wars. However, during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, diverse radical affinity groups, underground subcultures, and student protest movements proclaimed their connections to surrealism.
Radical Dreams argues that surrealism was more than an avant-garde art movement; it was a living current of anti-authoritarian resistance.
Featuring perspectives from scholars across the humanities and, distinctively, from contemporary surrealist practitioners, this volume examines surrealism’s role in postwar oppositional cultures. It demonstrates how surrealism’s committed engagement extends beyond the parameters of an artistic style or historical period, with chapters devoted to Afrosurrealism, Ted Joans, punk, the Situationist International, the student protests of May ’68, and other topics. Privileging interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and material culture approaches, contributors address surrealism’s interaction with New Left politics, protest movements, the sexual revolution, psychedelia, and other subcultural trends around the globe.
A revelatory work, Radical Dreams definitively shows that the surrealist movement was synonymous with cultural and political radicalism. It will be especially valuable to those interested in the avant-garde, contemporary art, and radical social movements.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jonathan P. Eburne, David Hopkins, Claire Howard, Michael Löwy, Alyce Mahon, Gavin Parkinson, Grégory Pierrot, Penelope Rosemont, Ron Sakolsky, Marie Arleth Skov, Ryan Standfest, and Sandra Zalman.
Elliott H. King is Associate Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University and the author of Salvador Dalí: The Late Work and Dalí, Surrealism, and Cinema. He is a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism.
Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work. She co-edited the volume Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introductory Essays
Surrealism as Radicalism
Abigail Susik and Elliot H. King
Surrealism and Revolutionary Romanticism in May ’68
Michael Löwy
Part 1: Surrealist Solidarity
1. “Down with Art, Up with Revolution”: Protesting Dada and Surrealism in 1968
Sandra Zalman
2. Ted Joans, the Other Jones: Jazz Poet, Black Power Missionary, and Surrealist Interpreter
Grégory Pierrot
3. Angry, Hopeful Chaos an the Great Secret of Surrealism: Unraveling the Tangled Web of the 1970s
Penelope Rosemont
Part 2: Against the Liquidators
4. Passionate Attraction: Fourier, Feminism, Free Love, and L’Écart absolu
Claire Howard
5. “To Be a Painter Means to Oppose”: Exhibiting and Politicizing Robert Rauschenberg, 1959-1965
Gavin Parkinson
6. A Consciousness of Being: Burn, Baby, Burn and the Political Art of Roberto Matta
Alyce Mahon
Part 3: The Right to Insubordination
7. The Fantasy of a Powerful Myth: The Situationist International After Surrealism
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
8. Afrosurrealism as a Counterculture of Modernity
Jonathan P. Eburne
9. The Surrealist Adventure and the Poetry of Direct Action: Passionate Encounters Between the Chicago Surrealist Group, the Wobblies, and Earth First!
Ron Sakolsky
Part 4: Passional Attractions
10. A Useful Bile: André Breton’s Humour Noir in 1960s America
Ryan Standfest
11. Oz Magazine and British Counterculture: A Case Study in the Reception of Surrealism
David Hopkins
12. Surrealism and Punk: The Case of COUM Transmissions
Marie Arleth Skov
List of Contributors
Index
Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction
