Cultures du Surrealisme (review)

Antle, Martine. Cultures du surréalisme. Paris: Editions Acoria, 2001. Pp. 194.

As she states in the conclusion to this important new look at surrealism, Martine Antle uses the neglected media of theater and photography to review surrealism's multicultural aspects, showing how they are "fondamentaux pour une compréhension de l'altérité dans le surréalisme" (179). Antle studies how those surrealists who worked with theater and photography concentrated on the decentering of subjectivity, calling into question assumptions about sexuality and Eurocentrism. Under Antle's critical gaze the surrealist movement becomes a plural cultural phenomenon as it emerges from "l'élitisme culturel dans lequel il a été souvent cantonné par les historiens de la littérature" and proves itself to be enduring as a veritable "tremplin de courants contestataires" (180; 183).

Arguing that photography by its very process is surrealistic in nature because it could play with that supreme surrealist element of surprise, and a photograph writes with light, "en accord avec les principes de l'écriture automatique: le geste de l'opérateur est remplacé par le 'papier sensible,' le 'révélateur par excellence,'" Antle wonders why photography was not celebrated to nearly the same extent as painting, sculpture, or poetry, in the sense that few writings were dedicated to it by the surrealists (42; 40). Antle examines the surrealist predilection for group photographs: these illustrate the journals and were widely circulated in books by and about surrealism, resulting in a profusion of photographs within surrealism. Yet these works have been infrequently analyzed, even though the group "albums de photos" favored by the surrealists were never innocent. For example, automatic writing may be understood as a collective venture from Man Ray's well-known photograph of the group practicing automatic writing in 1924. The men are gathered around Simone Breton at the typewriter who, according to this reading, disappears into the shadows at the heart of the image. Rereading the photograph from a feminist perspective, Antle re-situates the woman at the crucial center of the image, the "pré-texte de la représentation," and "l'intermédiaire entre le groupe et l'écriture" (56). Although practically invisible according to the first reading, in the second we may see the woman as the critical body through which the collective écriture automatique will be recorded--from her ears and fingers onto the dark keyboard. Thanks to her corps the automatic corpus takes shape. Antle's reading emphasizes the way this image anticipates the transformation of the role of women in surrealism from muses to practitioners.

Antle moves to the study of three women artists in dada and surrealism, who used photography as a way to stamp their own individual perspectives on surrealist expression--Hannah Höch, Claude Cahun, and Lee Miller. Antle describes Miller's war photographs during World War II as situating "le genre photographique à mi-chemin de la photo-reportage et de la photographie artistique" (60). For Antle, Miller's mixture of art and journalism casts light upon her political focus. Antle shows how Miller's photograph Remington Silent snaps the bombed and destroyed typewriter on a broken pedestal with Bretonian black humor, thus reworking and politicizing the familiar motif of the surrealist object "détourné de sa fonction utilitaire et déréalisé; mais chez Lee Miller, de nouveau, le détournement de l'objet vise à des fins politiques" (61). Höch and Cahun also used photography for political ends. They both attacked clichés of cultural otherness--Höch challenged racist assumptions whereas Cahun problematized established codes of gender identity (73). Their work opened up surrealism to multicultural and lesbian dimensions, thus challenging the cultural hegemony of the surrealist movement itself.

Perhaps Antle's most original analysis is of Nadja, surrealism's most familiar and canonical work, which she gives a theatrical reading through the focal figure of the lesbian criminal Solange in the play that so fascinates Breton, Les Détraquées. Antle sees in Breton's extensive appreciation of the play an emphasis...