1929
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Anon. 'Le Monde au Temps des Surrealistes'. Brussels: Variétés, 1929
le monde au temps des surrealistes
And why, between 2016 and early 2022 when it all got uglier than one could believe possible, did everyone keep saying 'wow, this is, like, surreal'. Surrealists were at least witty. And knew what a map was.
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But, but. When André Breton wrote Surrealist manifesto in Paris in 1924, he was part of a fractious group of postwar artists and poets, surrealists all. Breton demanded notice, shocking with such phrases as ‘The simplest surrealist act consists, with revolvers in hand, of descending into the street and shooting at random, as much as possible, into the crowd.‘ 1 Seeing this enacted over 600 times in the United States in 2022, one might think of Breton as a disruptor, chaos the goal as surrealist actions purposely have no reason or logic. When Louis Aragon protested, Breton added, in 1925, ‘Surrealism is … a cry of the mind turning back on itself, and it is determined to break apart its fetters, even if it must be by material hammers!’ 2 Almost all the surrealists of early 1920s’ Paris had been conscripted for World War I; Breton worked with the shell-shocked, at the front Paul Éluard wrote 220 letters to families of men who had been killed. In the face of such useless destruction and futile loss of life, the state machinery that had caused such stupidity was to be destroyed, as Breton proposed, by a psychic automatism – ‘dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’ 3
Melancholic, tubercular Paul Éluard, surrealist war poet, abruptly left Paris in 1924, circuitously travelling to Indo-China using the 1922 map Les cinq parties du monde: planisphère comprenant toutes les possessions coloniales, chemins de fer, lignes de navigation, principales lines télégraphiqes, câbles . On his return to Paris, he drew the map above, which appeared in a special surrealist issue of Variétés , published in Brussels in 1929. Conventional maps attempt veracity; Éluard, witnessing the simultaneous wealth and brutality of colonialism, dispenses with scale in favour of distortions that loom large, or very small, in the mind. This is a map of a world blighted by the machinery of possession. The parts that loom large are largely authocthonous, un-colonised, unconsidered. The parts that are so diminished are the hopelessly corrupted capitalist empires, which used their colonised indigenous troops as cannon fodder in the Great War. p 1 Marguerite Bonnet, André Breton, naissance du surréalisme . Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1975 2 Bureaus de Recherches Surréalistes,15, Rue de Grenelle. In Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism , Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1989 3 André Breton. Surrealist manifesto . Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1924
Stephanie White is the editor of On Site review
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
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