Wolfgang Paalen, N.T., woodcut (DYN No. 1, 1942) Courtesy of the Fundacion Wolfgang e Isabel Paalen and Hayden Library Collections, ASU

 

Surrealism and the American West Conference

Oct. 26-7, 2006
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona

 

Surrealists Collect the West: Native American Culture, Display, Ethics

Totemic Landscapes and Vanishing Cultures through the Eyes of Wolfgang Paalen and Kurt Seligmann
Dr. Marie Mauzé, CNRS, Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, Paris

Only two members of the Surrealist circle, respectively Kurt Seligmann and Wolfgang Paalen, travelled to British Columbia and Alaska on the eve of World War II. Seligmann and Paalen not only showed a deep interest in collecting artefacts but were also fascinated by Indian mythology and its relations with totemic thought. Their curiosity about Northwest Coast art and culture was strengthened by a genuine attraction of the New World impressive landscapes. Seligmann and his wife Arlette undertook a trip to the Upper Skeena region, while Paalen, his wife Alice Rahon and the photographer Eva Sulzer travelled in British Columbia and Alaska.

While the surrealists did not leave a large body of texts eliciting their relations to Northwest Coast art and cultures or for that matter summarizing their thoughts on primitive art, we are lucky to have Paalen’s and Seligmann’s field notes, texts and photographic documents which enable us to analyze their somewhat romantic vision of unchanged “primitive” societies that could only be spoiled under the influence of western civilization. The aim of the paper is to explore both their shared and individual visions with regard to totemic landscapes and vanishing cultures and to relate them with that of surrealism.

‘Even the American Indian finds a place’—Surrealist display and (anti)national identity
Susan Power, Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris

This paper examines the use of Native American objects in Surrealist strategies of display in order to interrogate larger issues of identity, place and nation. The 1942 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, organized by Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp in New York City, is both grounded in the specificity of time and place that it occupied and emblematic of the international surrealist exhibitions the movement staged from the mid-1930s onward. These shows, often designed as multi-sensorial environments, showcased an international display of art, ranging from painting, sculpture and photography by artists more or less closely affiliated with the Parisian surrealist group to non-western objects, folk art, art of the insane, and children’s art.

Invariably displaced, the Native American objects,“which the Surrealists particularly appreciate,” function on a number of levels in the movement’s collective activities: both representing and performing surrealist aims while inscribing it within the larger American landscape.  New World attitudes toward Amerindian cultures and art inform surrealism as it winds through the fabric of the real and imaginary spaces of the Americas.  The exhibitions, as “contact zones,” thus establish a point of convergence and transit, an in-between space of “dwelling in travel,” a borderless spatial construct enacting the complexity and dynamism of the surrealist project.

Surrealism and Native America
Dr. Ralph Shain, Loyola University, Chicago

Charges of appropriation and misappropriation have been levelled against the Surrealists with regard to their use and collecting of Native American art.  In this paper I briefly survey  surrealists engagement with Native America in order to indicate a defense against such charges.  Such a defense would situate the surrealists' engagement with Native America in the context of their anti-colonial activities, viewing surrealism as primarily a political movement, rather than as a group of artists who saw Native America as a source to be mined for the production of art.
 
After briefly noting the interests in Native America of Breton, Eluard, and Ernsts, I will isolate three moments as focal points:  (1)  the 1927 exhibit of "Yves Tanguy et objets d'Amerique" which produced Eluard's text on Native America for the exhibit catalogue;  (2) Kurt Seligman's trip to the Northwest Coast to purchase objects and gather information for the Musee de l'Homme, which produced his text, "Dialogue with a Tsimshian" published in Minotaure;  and (3) the surrealists' purchase of Native objects and visits to Native peoples while they were in the U.S. during World War II.  

Paysage totémique: Native American art and Pan-Americanism in DYN
Dr. Courtney Gilbert, Curator of Visual Arts, Sun Valley Center for the Arts

In 1939, surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen journeyed from Paris to the Pacific Northwest with painter and poet Alice Rahon, and photographer Eva Sulzer.  The trio traveled through coastal British Columbia and Alaska taking notes, taking photographs, and collecting Native American objects.  Following the outbreak of World War II that fall, Paalen, Rahon and Sulzer settled in Mexico. Paalen surrounded himself with art he had acquired in the Pacific Northwest and began to study and to collect the art of pre-Columbian Mexico.  He also published the journal DYN, filled with articles that blended art, poetry, literature, and anthropology. 

This paper considers Paalen’s engagement with indigenous American cultures and their place within the pages of DYN.  The paper argues that while Paalen’s engagement with Native American art played a specific role within the development of his own artistic theories, it also reflected his absorption of broader ideas related to pan-American ideology in circulation in Mexico at the time – a doctrine seemingly opposed to and disconnected from the tenets of surrealism. 

Among Paalen’s collaborators on DYN, however, were artist and anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias and painter Carlos Mérida, whose own promotion of pan-Americanism subtly informed Paalen’s conceptual framework for native cultures of the Americas.  The paper argues that Paalen accommodated pan-Americanist ideology through the adoption of its indigenist, rather than political, aspects, and that his embrace of these ideas mirrored shifts in the broader surrealist approach to the Americas during the 1940s.

Keynote lecture

The Open Road : Surrealism and Travel
Robert McNab, Cargo Press/Artists on Film Trust

Surrealists in the West

Mimesis and Metamorphosis in the Arizona Landscapes of Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning
Dr. Samantha Kavky, Pennsylvania State University, Berks

After immigrating to America during the Second World War, the German Surrealist Max Ernst married the American painter Dorothea Tanning and settled in the isolated desert town of Sedona, Arizona. This paper looks at Ernst and Tanning’s Arizona landscapes of the 1940s, comparing the themes and function of mimesis and metamorphosis present in the work of each artist. Both artists respond visually to the writings of Roger Caillois on animal mimicry, and both include iconographic references to Classical tales of metamorphosis in their paintings. Tanning eventually rejects the Arizona landscape for psychologically troubling interiors, whereas Ernst explores techniques designed to dissolve the boundaries between exterior and interior. Using a process called decalcomania, he confuses figure/ground relationships as well as the distinctions between the animate and inanimate. Influenced by the writings of Caillois, Freud and Lévi-Strauss, Ernst engages in an act of reciprocal mimicry to psychologically identify with his new environment.  

Dalí's American Dream or How Surrealism Became ‘Classic’
Dr. Frédérique Joseph-Lowery, Independent scholar

It is by studying the displacement of Gradiva in the “Virgin land of America,” in Dalí's autobiography or in his short movie Destino, that I propose to question the fruitful change of scene through which Surrealism became “classic,” as the author foretold in 1942. It is by applying the paranoiac-critical principle of “dépaysement” stated in Minotaure in1935 that Dalí cast a new light on the figure, who represented for Freud an allegorical representation of repression. Instead of focusing on the famous idiosyncratic foot of the female character chased in Pompeii, Dalí, in the United States, pulled a less often noticed significant thread of the novel: the lizard. The different metamorphoses that the lizard of Arizona takes in both Dalí's Secret Life and illustrations go beyond the simple iconographic level. The phonetic treatment of the word lizard has “figural” consequences as important as rooting Surrealism in the Medieval and Renaissance periods.

Natural-Born Surrealist: David Hare (1917-1992)
Jasper Sharp, Centre for Studies of Surrealism, Essex

David Hare was one of the most authentic and intensely Surrealist artists that America ever produced. A photographer, sculptor and draughtsman of great talent, he was exhibited at a young age by Julien Levy and Peggy Guggenheim, written about at length by Jean-Paul Sartre, and collected by the Arensbergs, Leo Castelli and a core of leading American museums. Access through birth and marriage to the very highest echelons of American political and cultural society, and his close friendships with Marcel Duchamp, Frederick Kiesler and other leading protagonists of what was an extraordinary period in cultural history, afforded Hare a privileged and unique position as a conduit between the two most dominant schools of twentieth century art; the renowned Surrealist avant-garde, displaced en masse as war ravaged Europe, and the younger, emerging generation of New York-based Abstract Expressionists to whose development they contributed so much.

His fascination with myth, ritual and the power of the subconscious, staple foodstuffs in the Surrealist larder, preceded however by several years his awareness of the movement, its doctrines and practitioners. The landscape of the southwestern United States is the ground from which he grew, where he was schooled and became acquainted at first hand with the culture and customs of the Native American Indian. It was this experience which stimulated his interest in Surrealism, rather the other way round. This paper will assess Hare's involvement with and importance to the Surrealist emigré milieu in the context of his upbringing in Colorado and New Mexico, his pioneering documentation of the area's indigenous peoples, and his instinctive assimilation of its physical and spiritual characteristics into his artistic practice.

Predicting Fetishism: Alfonso Ossorio´s Taos drawings, 1940-41
Dr. Ellen Landau, Case Western Reserve University

Examination of Alfonso Ossorio's signature assemblages known as congregations, which began in the 1960s, should begin almost three decades earlier with a set of Surrealist-inspired drawings created in the American Southwest.  Ossorio once described the  intensely observed and distinctly disquieting “nature still lifes” he made in Taos in 1940-41 as “corn and skulls . . . sort of typical of what everyone who goes to New Mexico does.”  Close examination of the fastidiously rendered works Ossorio created in New Mexico, done in pen and ink imitating fifteenth century German silverpoint, reveals how radically different they actually were from “typical” Western scenes, and indicates how quintessentially “Ossorio” they already seem.  While obviously taking their place in a time-honored vanitas tradition, Ossorio's phantasmagoric Taos skull pictures clearly prefigure the obsessive and nightmarish apotropaic vocabulary of his later congregations.

These drawings predict, with remarkable accuracy, primary elements of his exceedingly strange and wonderfully fetishistic mature artistic sensibility, hinting as well at reasons why, aided by his fortunate economic circumstance, Ossorio would later become a major collector and champion of the work of Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Art Brut and Jean Dubuffet. Ossorio's highly detailed Taos drawings can be read as a confirmation of the artist's own feelings of alterity (based on his ethnic heritage and sexuality) and as a rehearsal for the obsessions that would constitute his signature theme. They are best understood in connection with Dalíesque "initiatory" preoccupations such as eroticism and religion, metaphoricity of the body, and the complicated relationship between pleasure, pain and death.  These same fixations permeating his early works on paper were to resurface boldly (transformed into three-dimensions) in Ossorio's later congregations.

The Legendary Life of Max Ernst in America; preceded by a brief discussion on the Surrealists’ need for a new myth
Dr. Ludger Derenthal, Museum of Photography, Berlin

In 1942, André Breton published an article in the Max Ernst issue of the avantgarde magazine View, entitled “The Legendary Life of Max Ernst in America. Preceded by a brief discussion on the need for a New Myth.” The subject of this talk will be why, during his exile in the United States, Breton considered whether there was a need for a New Myth, in which tradition of Surrealist history this discussion can be placed, and why Max Ernst believed it necessary to incorporate mythology in his art. The second part will examine this incorporation in an analysis of Ernst’s sculpture Capricorn and its relation to Amerindian artifacts. It wasn't only the iconography or the pure beauty or the different quality of the artifacts which fascinated the Surrealists. In their quest for a New Myth they tried to approach Native Americans so closely that their own works of art were made in the same spirit and could be used for the same purpose.

 

The Surrealist Lens

‘Surrealistic and disturbing’: Timothy O’Sullivan as seen by Ansel Adams in the 1930s
Dr. Britt Salvesen, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson

In 1937, Ansel Adams described the photographs taken some sixty years earlier by Timothy O’Sullivan in the American West as “surrealistic and disturbing.” He was writing to Beaumont Newhall, who was then curating a landmark photography exhibition a the Museum of Modern Art that formed the cornerstone for his later book, The History of Photography, which remains a standard text in the field. 

This paper will examine the key decade of the 1930s as a formative moment in the Modernist history of photography. At this time, Adams and Newhall—influenced also by Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Weston—developed a history for their young medium that emphasized certain practices and approaches.  The Western Survey photographs of the 1870s became cornerstones in this history, for they seemed to exemplify a photographic sensibility unencumbered by artistic aspiration. 

A tension develops here between the attempt to define and restrict the medium, and the need to explain the strange qualities of these early photographs, leading to the invocation of a highly current aesthetic category, surrealism.  To address this question, the paper will look at O’Sullivan in particular, whose work “out-surs the surrealists,” according to Adams, who became perhaps his most illustrious heir in depicting the same landscape. Ultimately this provides a different angle from which to view the West as subject and surrealism as style in the history of photography.

‘As if one´s eyelids had been cut away’: Frederick Sommer’s Arizona Landscapes
Dr. Ian Walker, School of Art, Media and Design, University of Wales

In 1944, the Surrealist magazine VVV published two photographs of the Arizona desert by Frederick Sommer. They are radical images in their minimalism and intensity of attention to (apparently) very little.

Sommer’s immediate connection was with Max Ernst, who saw these pictures when he visited Arizona in 1943. Later, when Ernst came to live at Sedona, the two men influenced each other’s work. Yves Tanguy also visited Ernst in 1951 and J.T. Soby suggested that the “breathless congestion of boulders, pebbles and bones” in Tanguy’s last paintings derive from his experience of the desert as viewed through Sommer’s photographs.

Even in Europe, where Surrealism was predominantly urban, there had been an interest in the extreme landscapes of desert or jungle. But while Salvador Dali transformed rock forms into bodies, the challenge of the desert as Sommer depicted it was that no such transformation was possible. But there was also a Surrealist fascination with the “terrain vague”—land which is formless, void of composition—and it would be intriguing to extend the idea to Sommer’s desert pictures, which equally irritate the eye with their apparent lack of organisation and focus.

Sommer’s work stand at the intersection between the photography of the American West and Surrealism—between Edward Weston and Max Ernst. But it is also quite unlike either and, in their unflinching gaze at a subject that is both intense and empty, Sommer’s Arizona Landscapes profoundly undermine the conventions of vision.

Clarence John Laughlin: photographing Surrealist New Orleans and the West
Dr. Lewis Kachur, Kean University of New Jersey

Beginning with his 1940-41 exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery, Clarence John Laughlin’s photographs presented his native New Orleans as a readymade Surrealist tableau.  The distinctive sepulchral graveyards of the city were one focus, the decaying nineteenth century plantations around Louisiana were another.  Pursuing a deChirican sensibility of “mystery and melancholy,” Laughlin drew upon yet also contributed to the mythology of New Orleans as enigma, city of the marvelous.  Thus the possibilities and limitations of Surrealism as place find a test case in New Orleans.
 
Laughlin produced a significant body of work in the West during the 1950s and ‘60s.  In the Arizona mountains he turns from the deChirican to the Dalian in a number of double images, reflecting his awareness of Dali’s paranoiac-critical theory and other writings.  

Creamed Corn and Convulsive Beauty
Raihan Kadri, University of Essex, Colchester

This paper will investigate the Surrealist use of myth and how it was meant to be organized into a broader sense of ‘modern mythology’.  As my main point of focus, I examine David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, specifically in the way it reflects a mode of subjectivity that closely corresponds to that developed by French Surrealism in the mid-1920s.  Twin Peaks is perhaps best remembered for two seemingly paradoxical themes: first, its representation of the United States’ Pacific Northwest and evocation of Native American myth (particularly concerning conjuring and magic); and secondly, its radical decentering of identity into a strange dreamscape. 

By reading these facets of the show/feature film against the more rigorous model of intersubjectivity formulated by early-Surrealism—particularly in Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris—I attempt to show them not as paradoxical but complementary movements meant to produce a coherent mythology with important implications on identity and action. With Surrealist Paris and Twin Peaks as examples, I intend to demonstrate how even as a new sense of individual identity is elaborated, the circumscription of individual subjectivity (of a Freudian model) by the inter-subjective structure of modern mythology reconfigures concepts of space and terrain in which individual identities are organized, such that notions of community come to be defined.

By emphasizing Surrealism’s prevailing interest in mythology over individual myths, the argument is extended to the possibilities for artistic representation.  By way of Artaud’s theory of cinema and the representation of modern mythologies along the metaphors of ‘constellation’ and ‘open architecture’, the paper will conclude with considerations on how the contemporary serialized television show—with Twin Peaks as exemplar—may currently be the most promising medium for surreal expression.