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Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism argues that Surrealism worked as a powerful agitator to disrupt dominant ideas of modern art in the United States. Unlike standard accounts that focus on Surrealism in the U.S. during the 1940s as a point of departure for the ascendance of the New York School, this study contends that Surrealism has been integral to the development of American visual culture over the course of the twentieth century. Through analysis of Surrealism in both the museum and the marketplace, Sandra Zalman tackles Surrealism?s multi-faceted circulation as both elite and popular. Zalman shows how the American encounter with Surrealism was shaped by Alfred Barr, William Rubin and Rosalind Krauss as these influential curators mobilized Surrealism to compose, to concretize, or to unseat narratives of modern art in the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s - alongside Surrealism?s intersection with advertising, Magic Realism, Pop, and the rise of contemporary photography. As a popular avant-garde, Surrealism openly resisted art historical classification, forcing the supposedly distinct spheres of modernism and mass culture into conversation and challenging theories of modern art in which it did not fit, in large part because of its continued relevance to contemporary American culture.
"Up Against the Real is an exciting book about anti-art in the Sixties. It is the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and their acrimonious relationship to the New York art world in that decade. Now cited as originators of the protest aesthetics common today, Black Mask employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They forced their way into the Pentagon during a political protest, threw rotten eggs and blood at Secretary of State Dean Rusk, dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center during a gala at the Metropolitan Opera, published a broadside, made films, tormented Andy Warhol, and much more, all covered in Nadja Millner-Larsen's book. Black Mask is an important example of the kind of organized art activism in the middle of this century. The group was active until 1968, when it went underground and changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (after a poem by Amiri Baraki). Its activities and strategies influenced the Black Arts Movement and the Art Workers' Coalition, which took over and trashed the Museum of Modern Art. Abbie Hoffman described the group in its second manifestation, Up Against the WallMF, as "the middle-class nightmare....an anti-media media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.""--
The art of Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) is usually viewed as quite distinct from Surrealism, a movement which the artist himself displayed some hostility towards. However, Rauschenberg had a very positive reception among Surrealists, particularly across the period 1959-69. In the face of Rauschenberg's avowals of his own 'literalism' and insistence on his art as 'facts,' this book gathers generous evidence of the poetic, metaphorical, allusive, associative and connotative dimensions of the artist's oeuvre as identified by Surrealists, and thus extrapolates new readings from Rauschenberg's key works on that basis. By viewing Rauschenberg's art against the expansion of the cultural influence of the United States in Europe in the period after the Second World War and the increasingly politicized activities of the Surrealists in the era of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism shows how poetic inference of the artist's work was turned towards political interpretation. By analysing Rauschenberg's art in the context of Surrealism, and drawing from it new interpretations and perspectives, this volume simultaneously situates the Surrealist movement in 1960s American art criticism and history.
In 1972, Angela Carter translated Xavière Gauthier’s ground-breaking feminist critique of the surrealist movement, Surréalisme et sexualité (1971). Although the translation was never published, the project at once confirmed and consolidated Carter’s previous interest in surrealism, representation, gender and desire and aided her formulation of a new surrealist-feminist aesthetic. Carter’s sustained engagement with surrealist aesthetics and politics as well as surrealist scholarship aptly demonstrates what is at stake for feminism at the intersection of avant-garde aesthetics and the representation of women and female desire. Drawing on previously unexplored archival material, such as typescripts, journals, and letters, Anna Watz’s study is the first to trace the full extent to which Carter’s writing was influenced by the surrealist movement and its critical heritage. Watz’s book is an important contribution to scholarship on Angela Carter as well as to contemporary feminist debates on surrealism, and will appeal to scholars across the fields of contemporary British fiction, feminism, and literary and visual surrealism.
This volume examines the relationship between occultism and Surrealism, specifically exploring the reception and appropriation of occult thought, motifs, tropes and techniques by Surrealist artists and writers in Europe and the Americas, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Its central focus is the specific use of occultism as a site of political and social resistance, ideological contestation, subversion and revolution. Additional focus is placed on the ways occultism was implicated in Surrealist discourses on identity, gender, sexuality, utopianism and radicalism.
Vivienne Brough-Evans proposes a compelling new way of reevaluating aspects of international surrealism by means of the category of divin fou, and consequently deploys theories of sacred ecstasy as developed by the Collège de Sociologie (1937–39) as a critical tool in shedding new light on the literary oeuvre of non-French writers who worked both within and against a surrealist framework. The minor surrealist genre of prose literature is considered herein, rather than surrealism's mainstay, poetry, with the intention of fracturing preconceptions regarding the medium of surrealist expression. The aim is to explore whether International surrealism can begin to be more fully explained by an occluded strain of 'dissident' surrealist thought that searches outside the self through the affects of ekstasis. Bretonian surrealism is widely discussed in the field of surrealist studies, and there is a need to consider what is left out of surrealist practice when analysed through this Bretonian lens. The Collège de Sociologie and Georges Bataille's theories provide a model of such elements of 'dissident' surrealism, which is used to analyse surrealist or surrealist influenced prose by Alejo Carpentier, Leonora Carrington and Gellu Naum respectively representing postcolonial, feminist and Balkan locutions. The Collège and Bataille's 'dissident' surrealism diverges significantly from the concerns and approach towards the subject explored by surrealism. Using the concept of ekstasis to organise Bataille's theoretical ideas of excess and 'inner experience' and the Collège's thoughts on the sacred it is possible to propose a new way of reading types of International surrealist literature, many of which do not come to the forefront of the surrealist literary oeuvre.
The Surrealist Movement is an international intellectual movement that has led a sustained questioning of the basis of human experience under twentieth- and twenty-first century modernity since its founding in the early 1920s. Influenced by the psychoanalytical teachings of Sigmund Freud, Surrealism emerged among the generation that had witnessed the insanity and horror of the First World War, and was conceived of as a framework for investigating the little-understood phenomena of dreams and the unconscious. In these territories the surrealists recognized an alternative axis of human experience that did not align with the rational, workaday rhythms of modern life, and which instead revealed the extent to which individual subjectivity had been constrained by post-Enlightenment rationalism and by the economic forces governing the post-industrial world. Against these trends, the Surrealist Movement has sought to re-evaluate the foundations of modern society and reassert the primacy of the imagination for almost a century to-date. This book offers focused introductions to numerous writers, poets, artists, filmmakers, precursors, groups, movements, events, concepts, cultures, nations and publications connected to Surrealism, providing orientation for students and casual readers alike. Historical Dictionary of Surrealism, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 200 cross-referenced entries on the Surrealist Movement’s engagement with the realms of politics, philosophy, science, poetry, art and cinema, and charts the international surrealist community’s diverse explorations of specific thematic territories such as magic, occultism, mythology, eroticism and gothicism. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about surrealism.
Surrealism was a cultural movement started in France in the 1920s, which is best known for producing stunning visual artwork and inspirational writings, among other artistic achievements. Through well-researched main text, readers will learn about the lives of influential Surrealists such as Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, and others who contributed to this essential period of art history. In addition, informative sidebars; annotated quotes from artists, historians, and other experts; and bold examples of renowned Surrealist artwork provide extra insight into this captivating topic, which will stimulate the minds of young artists and art lovers.
In A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm, Catriona McAra offers the first critical study of the literary work of the celebrated American painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012). McAra fills a major gap in the scholarship, repositioning Tanning’s writing at the centre of her entire creative oeuvre and focusing on a little-known short story "Abyss," a gothic-flavoured, desert adventure which Tanning worked on intermittently throughout her creative life, finally publishing it in 2004 as Chasm: A Weekend. McAra performs a major reassessment of the visual and literary principles upon which the surrealist movement was initially founded. Combining a groundbreaking methodological approach with reference to cultural theory and feminist aesthetics as well as Tanning’s unpublished journals and notes, McAra reveals Tanning as a key player in contemporary art practice as well as in the historical surrealist milieu.
Today the Museum of Modern Art is widely recognized for establishing the canon of modern art; yet in its early years, the museum considered modern art part of a still unfolding experiment in contemporary visual production. By bracketing MoMA's early history from its later reputation, this book explores the ways the Museum acted as a laboratory to set an ambitious agenda for the exhibition of a multidisciplinary idea of modern art. Between its founding in 1929 and its 20th anniversary in 1949, MoMA created the first museum departments of architecture and design, film, and photography in the country, marshaled modern art as a political tool, and brought consumer culture into a versatile yet institutional context. Encompassing 14 essays that investigate the diversity of modern art, this volume demonstrates how MoMA's programming shaped a version of modern art that was not elitist but fundamentally intertwined with all levels of cultural production.