Sejanus.Aelianus
Veteran
You might want to get your optician to check your eyesight. On the interchat, people will argue about anything 😀
I, however, agree with you.
Cartier-Bresson - Surrealism and communism!
- Thread starter RichC
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You might want to get your optician to check your eyesight. On the interchat, people will argue about anything 😀
I, however, agree with you.
Sparrow
Veteran
... one interesting, and rather surreal Marxist factette is to be found in Highgate Cemetery ... where Marx's grave is to be found just opposite Herbert Spencer ... those of an English persuasion will get the irony of associating Marx & Spencer so closely on a few levels ...
Roger Hicks
Veteran
I may be missing some irony here, but since when did revolutionary communism have anything to do with "going into the street, revolvers in hand, and firing at random, as fast as possible, into a crowd"
Cheers,
R.
Scrambler
Well-known
I never thought of random mass killings as Surrealist acts before this thread.
telenous
Well-known
The phrasing is telltale. One would expect talk of class struggle, overthrowing the capitalists, even a certain legitimization of violent revolutionary conflict. What one gets instead is a (figurative) recommendation for random and indiscriminate violence against everyone. The proletariat, alongside everyone else, be damned. To go back to something I said earlier, the surrealists probably had a different thing in mind than the communists when they talked about revolution. They thought theirs was the kind that would shock the senses into awareness, jolt someone cozied up in bourgeois normalcy into a position of acute receptivity for a new kind of aesthetic experience. It wasn't politics they were really after, it was aesthetics; but revolutionary politics, along with much else, could be the means, in the above sense, to their particular aesthetic end.
Agreed. There's a very strong, mutual relation between the two.
.
Rodchenko
Olympian
One of the mistakes made by some of the commenters on this thread is to suggest that there are two distinct groups: Surrealists and Communists. There's clearly a Venn diagram to be drawn of this. Most Communists were not Surrealists; most Surrealists were Communists (Dali is the only exception I can think of, and his accommodation with Franco was the pragmatic action of a relentless self-promoter, who many Surrealists would not count among their number). Even in the Surrealist revival of the late 50s and 60s, the Communists (albeit not the CPGB post-56, but New Left) were strongly represented.
So it is not an essential requirement of Surrealism to be a Communist, but it happens that many are. Artists have pretty much always tended to the left politically, so it would be absurd to suggest otherwise.
Sejanus.Aelianus
Veteran
Hmmmm, Marxist-Spencerism. Now that would be something to consider. What with Spencer's leanings to Lamarkism and Marx's early tendency to Feuerbachian materialism, we could have ended up with a genuine Nazi-Soviet alliance and goodnight Vienna!
Just as well that each would have been repelled by the other, if they ever met. 😉
It might be time to cut up my M&S store card 😀
David Hughes
David Hughes
Hi,
What I find interesting is the number of people who look at the label and ignore the reality. What's labelled Communism often isn't.
Regards, David
What I find interesting is the number of people who look at the label and ignore the reality. What's labelled Communism often isn't.
Regards, David
RichC
Well-known
Irony? Absolutely none. I'm surprised you fail to see the connection... The hinge is the word "revolutionary".
Telenous succinctly explains the connection between surrealism - as envisaged by its founder, Andre Breton - and communism in his post, notably writing "It wasn't politics [the surrealists] were really after, it was aesthetics; but revolutionary politics, along with much else, could be the means, in the above sense, to their particular aesthetic end."
To Breton, surrealism was a social movement with the aim of cultural change through revolution, and achieved by acting, not thinking - in Breton's words, by "absolute automatism". Today, we often think of surrealism as merely a historical art movement, but it was envisaged to be far more disruptive.
Revolution by its very nature is the violent destruction of social order and cultural norms. Revolutionary communism - let's call it Marxism for the sake of argument - embraces violence; indeed, it's the very engine: class struggle culminating in social revolution and the downfall of the bourgeoisie.
Perhaps you were sidetracked by the word "random"? An essential difference between surrealism and communism concerns that word, "random" - for surrealists, revolution is an end in itself; for communists, revolution is a means to an end. However, as my post implied, I was highlighting similarity between the two social movements, not difference...
Roger Hicks
Veteran
Dear Rich,
And I'm equally surprised you can see a connection. I was sidetracked by the whole image. Do you REALLY believe that what you wrote is the "essential difference" between surrealism and communism? Most people can think of quite a lot of others. Just about everything, really, even if you regard Breton as the sole authority on surrealism (which in itself would be an oxymoron) AND if you take every word he wrote as Gospel.
Cheers,
R.
RichC
Well-known
No, I don't believe that. That would be patently foolish. Surrealism and communism are obviously far more different than they are the same.
My post should read "an essential difference" not "the essential difference" - difficult to concentrate and type on phones!
With that correction made, I stand by what I wrote.
As to Breton and surrealism... You need markers to evaluate anything, but measure their worth carefully. Otherwise, we end up with the worst excesses of relativism - a multitude of disconnected opinions.
We need to take account of ontology. Here, I'm talking about surrealism as it was between the wars (which seems sensible given the context of Cartier-Bresson and his photography, and the Paris exhibition of his work mentioned in the original post). And of course we can't take what Breton says as Gospel - but his comments about random shooting and automatism and the belief extant at that time of surrealism as a revolutionary force are, in my opinion, relevant. Surrealism post-World War 2 evolved into a different beast - it's now more fantastical, less political - but less germane to this discussion.
Sparrow
Veteran
... I suppose mentioning Futurism, Fascism and Filippo Marinetti as a precursor would be unhelpful at this point at this point?
Sejanus.Aelianus
Veteran
Crumbs! You like to live dangerously. 😀
Marinetti was definitely a one off. I can't see him as anything but a negative influence on Surrealism, if only because of his obsessive attempts to impose the Futurist Manifesto as the state art of Italy.
His persuasion of Mussolini to block Hitler's pet travelling exhibition of "degenerate art" and his later condemnation of anti-semitism, leave me wondering whether he simply liked to live dangerously or really was a bloke with something useful to say.
Rodchenko
Olympian
Futurism is an odd movement. It's the only one I can think of with a right-wing political bent. Between the wars, Surrealism and Dadaism are both strongly associated with the left.
Roger Hicks
Veteran
"The left" though is so far from monolithic that the term runs the risk of becoming meaningless.
Relevance to photography? Easy. There is a great difference between the artistic side of photography and the consumerist side. The artistic side is for the most part interested in people and empathy, commonly seen (in the old terms) as "left", while consumerism is exclusively interested in capitalist growth, which is in the old terms of the "right" (and which is also plainly unsustainable in the long term on a finite planet).
Cheers,
R.
Rodchenko
Olympian
A fair point.
It's a truism to say that most artists are leftward leaning, and have been historically. So not remarkable at all to say that a lot of surrealists were communists. And we know for certain that HCB was a surrealist. Further, we know that he was a communist, worked for a communist newspaper, espoused clearly socialist principles, and set up an agency with other socialists on socialist principles, although he later called himself an anarchist.
I don't see why any of this is contentious, and why anyone would like to deny HCB his vision, and the roots of it.
It's a truism to say that most artists are leftward leaning, and have been historically. So not remarkable at all to say that a lot of surrealists were communists. And we know for certain that HCB was a surrealist. Further, we know that he was a communist, worked for a communist newspaper, espoused clearly socialist principles, and set up an agency with other socialists on socialist principles, although he later called himself an anarchist.
I don't see why any of this is contentious, and why anyone would like to deny HCB his vision, and the roots of it.
Sparrow
Veteran
... yes but he did inspire some very pertinent art of that era, and I can see some of it in both Henri and Capa's work ... that painting of the machine-gunner in WW1 springs to mind, I forget the artist at the mo
Personally I think Futurism holds a better mirror up to early 20c than Surrealism
RichC
Well-known
Roger - relativism! I glossed over it in my previous post, but it really bugs me, and I was constantly arguing with my tutors and peers during my MA arts degree about it. Not helped by my background being firmly empirical - my other degree is in science.
I get the point that one can be too firmly wedded to a certain perspective, but going too far the other way - that all is relative, truth and has validity... then, you may as well give up discussing anything since you're juggling whilst attempting to stand on shifting sands!
There's a happy medium, where you can stand on firm ground - whilst aware that it may only be permanent in certain contexts. For example, note my delineation of surrealism in my previous post.
As Rodchenko says, the left has a meaning - and I'm pretty sure most of us in this thread hold similar ideas about the left, socialism, etc. I tend towards an ontological approach for cultural meaning - what is a particular thing to a specific group of people at a specific time and so on
I get the point that one can be too firmly wedded to a certain perspective, but going too far the other way - that all is relative, truth and has validity... then, you may as well give up discussing anything since you're juggling whilst attempting to stand on shifting sands!
There's a happy medium, where you can stand on firm ground - whilst aware that it may only be permanent in certain contexts. For example, note my delineation of surrealism in my previous post.
As Rodchenko says, the left has a meaning - and I'm pretty sure most of us in this thread hold similar ideas about the left, socialism, etc. I tend towards an ontological approach for cultural meaning - what is a particular thing to a specific group of people at a specific time and so on
Rodchenko
Olympian
Surrealism and Dada can be seen as reactions to the turmoil of the early century. Futurism and (to an extent) Socialist Realism create a utopian vision in their art to try to construct a future worth working towards. Dada & Surrealism abandon that completely. Different ways of dealing with crisis.
Rangefinderfreak
Well-known
The most important theorema of communism: What is yours, will be eventually mine, but don`t ever dream that what is mine, will NEVER be yours...
Surrealism: What is mine, you don`t get, as it is immaterial. What is yours, you will be offering to me to get that what you think is "material"...
Surrealism: What is mine, you don`t get, as it is immaterial. What is yours, you will be offering to me to get that what you think is "material"...
