Surrealist sabotage and the war on work

Surrealist sabotage and the war on work
Author: Abigail Susik
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1526155001

In Surrealist sabotage and the war on work, art historian Abigail Susik uncovers the expansive parameters of the international surrealist movement’s ongoing engagement with an aesthetics of sabotage between the 1920s and the 1970s, demonstrating how surrealists unceasingly sought to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work. In four case studies devoted to surrealism’s transatlantic war on work, Susik analyses how artworks and texts by Man Ray, André Breton, Simone Breton, André Thirion, Óscar Domínguez, Konrad Klapheck, and the Chicago surrealists, among others, were pivotally impacted by the intransigent surrealist concepts of principled work refusal, permanent strike, and autonomous pleasure. Underscoring surrealism’s profound relevance for readers engaged in ongoing debates about gendered labour and the wage gap, endemic over-work and exploitation, and the vicissitudes of knowledge work and the gig economy, Surrealist sabotage and the war on work reveals that surrealism’s creative work refusal retains immense relevance in our wired world.

Radical Dreams

Radical Dreams
Author: Elliott H. King
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2022-03-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271091665

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.

Surrealism and Film After 1945

Surrealism and Film After 1945
Author: Kristoffer Noheden
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-07-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781526179012

Surrealism and Film after 1945 is the first collection devoted to the vibrant culture of transnational surrealist cinema since the Second World War. Eleven chapters by leading and emerging scholars of surrealism and film studies establish the parameters of this history and situate surrealism as a major force in postwar cinema.

Surrealism Beyond Borders

Surrealism Beyond Borders
Author: Stephanie D'Alessandro
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2021-10-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1588397270

Surrealism Beyond Borders challenges conventional narratives of a revolutionary artistic, literary, and philosophical movement. Tracing Surrealism's influence and legacy from the 1920s to the late 1970s in places as geographically diverse as Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Romania, Syria, Thailand, and Turkey, this publication includes more than 300 works of art in a variety of media by well-known figures—including Dalí, Ernst, Kahlo, Magritte, and Miró—as well as numerous artists who are less widely known. Contributions from more than forty distinguished international scholars explore the network of Surrealist exchange and collaboration, artists' responses to the challenges of social and political unrest, and the experience of displacement and exile in the twentieth century. The multiple narratives addressed in this expansive book move beyond the borders of history, geography, and nationality to provocatively redraw the map of Surrealism.

Chimaera

Chimaera
Author: Ian Irvine
Publisher: Santhenar Trust
Total Pages: 1000
Release:
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

In a few minutes of overwhelming violence, the Council’s air-dreadnought fleet has destroyed Fiz Gorgo’s defences. Flydd, Irisis and their small band of rebels are to be executed in a brutal aerial spectacle designed to reinforce Chief Scrutator Ghorr’s power and majesty. Nish is their one remaining hope. But Nish is trapped in a burning watchtower, and hunted by both the scrutators and his tormented former lover, Ullii, whose twin brother he accidentally killed. Before Nish can hope to rescue his friends, he must convince Ullii to spare him, then overcome the most powerful cabal of wizards in the world – as well as the Council’s four hundred crack guards. Yet even if he succeeds, to win the war the rebels still have to defeat the scrutators and overthrow Nennifer, the corrupt Council’s dread bastion, before the rampaging lyrinx overwhelm all Santhenar. You won’t want to miss this edge-of-the seat epic fantasy series by a million-selling author. What reviewers say about the Three Worlds books “A compelling adventure in a landscape full of wonders.” – Locus “A page-turner of the highest order … Formidable!” – SFX on Geomancer “It is the most engrossing book I’ve read in years.” – Van Ikin, Sydney Morning Herald “Readers of Eddings, Goodkind and Jordan will lap this one up.” – Starlog “Utterly absorbing.” Stephen Davenport, Independent Weekly “For sheer excitement, there’s just no one like Irvine.” SFX on The Destiny of the Dead “As good as anything I have read in the fantasy genre.” – Adelaide Advertiser Reviews and Honours for The Well of Echoes Scrutator, Honourable Mention, 2003 Aurealis Award for best fantasy novel. Also listed in the Sydney Morning Herald’s BEST BOOKS OF 2003. Chimaera listed in the Sydney Morning Herald’s BEST BOOKS OF 2004. “Ian Irvine has produced one of those rarities in the fantasy genre, and that is a unique, well-thought-out world coupled with a well-written storyline. A gripping read.” Enigma “Irvine mixes in plenty of interesting characters of uncertain moral fibre to create a compelling adventure in a landscape full of wonders.” Locus. "The final payoff is fantastic. The most unflaggingly inventive storyteller we've seen in years. Chimaera brings his Well of Echoes saga to a spectacular and satisfying conclusion, confirming his reputation for first-rate fantasy page turners." Van Ikin, Sydney Morning Herald. “A page-turner of the highest order ... Irvine can now consider himself comfortably ranked next to the works of Robert Jordan and David Eddings and, more appropriately, the mighty Anne McCaffrey. Formidable!” SFX “A story that is begging to be filmed. Very enjoyable. The action doesn’t flag.” – Sue Davies, SF Crowsnest.

SCUM Manifesto

SCUM Manifesto
Author: Valerie Solanas
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784784419

Classic radical feminist statement from the woman who shot Andy Warhol “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Outrageous and violent, SCUM Manifesto was widely lambasted when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published the book just before she became a notorious household name and was confined to a mental institution. But for all its vitriol, it is impossible to dismiss as the mere rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has proved prescient, not only as a radical feminist analysis light years ahead of its time—predicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against underrepresentation in the arts—but also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman. In this edition, philosopher Avital Ronell’s introduction reconsiders the evocative exuberance of this infamous text.

Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit

Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit
Author: James Trier
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2019-07-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9004402012

Winner of the 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit presents a history of the two avant-garde groups that French filmmaker and subversive strategist Guy Debord founded and led: the Lettrist International (1952–1957) and the Situationist International (1957–1972). Debord is popularly known for his classic book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), but his masterwork is the Situationist International (SI), which he fashioned into an international revolutionary avant-garde group that orchestrated student protests at the University of Strasbourg in 1966, contributed to student unrest at the University of Nanterre in 1967–1968, and played an important role in the occupations movement that brought French society to a standstill in May of 1968. The book begins with a brief history of the Lettrist International that explores the group’s conceptualization and practice of the critical anti-art practice of détournement, as well as the subversive spatial practices of the dérive, psychogeography, and unitary urbanism. These practices, which became central to the Situationist International, anticipated many contemporary cultural practices, including culture jamming, critical media literacy, and critical public pedagogy. This book follows up the edited book Détournement as Pedagogical Praxis (Sense Publishers, 2014), and together they offer readers, particularly those in the field of Education, an introduction to the history, concepts, and critical practices of a group whose revolutionary spirit permeates contemporary culture, as can be seen in the political actions of Pussy Riot in Russia, the “yellow vest” protesters in France, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and the striking teachers and student protesters on campuses throughout the U.S. See inside the book.

Love’s Shadow

Love’s Shadow
Author: Paul A. Bové
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674977157

A case for literary critics and other humanists to stop wallowing in their aestheticized helplessness and instead turn to poetry, comedy, and love. Literary criticism is an agent of despair, and its poster child is Walter Benjamin. Critics have spent decades stewing in his melancholy. What if instead we dared to love poetry? To choose comedy over Hamlet’s tragedy, romance over Benjamin’s suicide on the edge of France, of Europe, of civilization? Paul Bové challenges young lit critters to throw away their shades and let the sun shine in. Love’s Shadow is his three-step manifesto for a new literary criticism that risks sentimentality and melodrama and eschews self-consciousness. The first step is to choose poetry. There has been since the time of Plato a battle between philosophy and poetry. Philosophy has championed misogyny, while poetry has championed women, like Shakespeare’s Rosalind. Philosophy is ever so stringent; try instead the sober cheerfulness of Wallace Stevens. Bové’s second step is to choose the essay. He praises Benjamin’s great friend and sometime antagonist Theodor Adorno, who gloried in the writing of essays, not dissertations and treatises. The third step is to choose love. If you want a Baroque hero, make it Rembrandt, who brought lovers to life in his paintings. Putting aside passivity and cynicism would amount to a revolution in literary studies. Bové seeks nothing less, and he has a program for achieving it.

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism
Author: Gavin Parkinson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2023-03-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1501358278

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.

Rogomelec

Rogomelec
Author: Leonor Fini
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781939663481

This novella's ambiguous narrator sets off for the isolated local of Rogomelec--where a crumbling monastery serves as a sanatorium and offers a cure involving a diet of plants and flowers--and moves through a walking dream involving strangely scented monks, vibratory concerts in a cavernous ossuary, and ritualist pomp with costumes of octopi and shining beetles. As the days unfold, the narrator discovers that the "celebration of the king" is approaching, the events of which will lead to a shocking discovery in Rogomelec's gothic ruins