Description
Book SynopsisSurrealism 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 surreali
Trade Review“Radical Dreams reignites Surrealism’s revolutionary appeal from the 1960s and 1970s and rewrites an often forgotten chapter of the movement.”
—Stephanie D’Alessandro,Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Table of ContentsList 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
