Surrealism at Play by Susan Laxton (review)

Like other notable studies of surrealism published in recent years, Susan Laxton’s new book takes a single theme or concept as the organizing principle of what presents itself as a new history of the movement.¹ This can be a useful strategy, allowing critics to illuminate neglected figures, practices or influences and to reframe or renegotiate the surrealist canon. In Laxton’s case it gives rise to original and thought-provoking readings of familiar works or groups of works and brings together an intriguing—sometimes surprising—corpus of material. Laxton’s premise is that play is perhaps the most radical dimension of surrealist activity, but one that has been critically neglected. The first part of this is plausible, the second rather less so; games, wanderings, and ludic creative strategies have long been acknowledged as central both to surrealist practice and to its influence on later movements such as situationism and Fluxus. Laxton’s contribution lies in the particular way in which she understands “play” in this context, and in the sustained attention she pays to how it stands in relation to work, with its associations of purposefulness, productivity, and critical reason, and to art, which fits neither category easily. She rightly rejects the idea that surrealist play is straightforwardly joyous and liberatory, noting the compulsion and destructiveness that characterize it as marked by the Freudian death drive.²

Laxton’s understanding of play draws heavily on Walter Benjamin, who has long been the favored theorist of scholars of surrealism. Laxton argues, following Miriam Hansen, that Benjamin’s conception of Spielraum (translated variously as space or room for play, or “scope-for-action”) offers an idea of play that no longer sees it in Kantian terms as an end in itself, but treats it rather as a means, albeit a means without end—that is to say without closure. For Benjamin—and for the surrealists—this idea enabled play to be anchored in politics, specifically via technology: “In an effort to theorize the relation between art and technology, thus restoring art’s relevance to modern social relations, Benjamin privileged technologically based artworks as vehicles through which the subject could form a healthy, rather than alienated, relationship to mechanical forms” (6). This could be achieved via exactly the kind of play that so appealed to Benjamin in his encounters with surrealism, and it is to these “techno-ludic” forms that Laxton devotes the main body of her study.

The book is arranged in four chapters and a “postlude,” the chapters bearing one-word titles that characterize particular practices or effects of surrealist play: “Blur,” “Drift,” “System,” and “Pun.” Chapter one deals with Man Ray’s cameraless photograms or rayographs, an unexpected starting point that announces Laxton’s revisionist approach to the surrealist canon. Arguing that “ludic flux and blur [were] the dominant artistic modes” of the “époque floue” during which surrealism emerged from Paris Dada, Laxton presents the rayographs’ technical and aleatory dimensions as key to their “critical ludic” power, and notably their capacity to “blur the boundary between photographic realism and modernist abstraction” (71, 24). Laxton offers some excellent observations on depth and perspective in these complex works, but in order to sustain her argument she is forced at times to overstate claims—about the rayographs’ debt to chance, for example, and the extent to which they “betray any grasp of photography as the locus of objective knowledge” (71). As the book’s many wonderful illustrations make clear, the rayographs rarely render their referents completely “unrecognizable” and for all that they emerge from a playful and apparently spontaneous engagement with found materials, they are also the result of what became a systematic process, studiously mastered (71).

We stay with Man Ray for chapter two, albeit more obliquely through an account of his collection of photographs taken by the much older Parisian street photographer Eugène Atget. Man Ray’s album of Atget photographs, now held in the collection of the George Eastman Museum, is a fascinating object of...