Breton's Surrealism

  

 For convenience, my quotations from Breton use the translation by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, readily available at https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Breton_Andre_Manifestoes_of_Surrealism.pdf.   References in parentheses are to this text; those in brackets are endnotes.

 

       Surrealism is one of the chief artistic movements of the twentieth century.  Its practices are now not only familiar in countless works of art, but in advertisements and popular culture as well.  Song lyrics (and band names) that would have seemed radically revolutionary in the 1920s had, by the 1960s, become commonplace on popular radio stations.  In spite of earlier precedents for writing that seems Surrealist as well as prior uses of the term by Apollinaire and Yvan Goll, the Surrealists, as an organized cultural formation, are generally traced to André Breton’s 1924 “Surrealist Manifesto.”  For decades Breton defined the movement, notoriously exerting a tyrannical authority over the group, admitting new acolytes and expelling the insubordinate, while maintaining tight control of the brand during his entire life.

     Intended as a revolutionary call to action, Breton’s manifesto might well be read as a look backwards, a belated document of Romanticism.  It is quite natural that he makes an extended example of a passage from the 1796 novel The Monk.  The Surrealist valorization of irrationality and the marvelous would have been familiar to Lewis’s readers over a hundred years earlier.  For Breton “in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest.” (9)

     While Breton’s Surrealist program is wandering and self-indulgent, its general drift is unmistakable.  He seeks to question the value of received ideas and everyday experience, rejecting the limitation of imagination by “the laws of an arbitrary utility”  which confine most peoples’ imagination to “a state of slavery.” (4)  “The case against the realistic attitude demands to be examined,” he insists, since “the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism . . . clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit.” (6)  In reaction against Realism, he quotes a passage from Crime and Punishment, the “purely informative style” of which he declares to be an “unworthy” “school-boy description.” (8)

     In place of a straightforward imitation of ordinary (or dramatic) lived experience, Breton offers new perspectives available in such sources as dreams, madness, chance operations, and the minds of children.  The first of these suggestions flies in the face of the cliché that nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams, a notion seconded by most readers of Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac.  In literature all readers are aware that anything presented as a dream, a vision, a fantasy, or hallucination is likely to be of critical importance in  understanding the narrative in which it is embedded, but these are carefully composed elements of a work of art, not simple transcriptions of real dreams.   Deluded perhaps by such precedents, Breton and others (Gide even) published what purported to be their dreams, but these have attracted little attention, particularly when compared to the concept on which their presentation to the public is founded.  The Surrealist fetishization of dreams is  a modern twist on the ancient idea that at night the gods speak to the sleeper, only in its twentieth century iteration the source of wisdom is not the divine but rather the unconscious.

     In fact the most dreams can do is to suggest possibilities that would not otherwise occur to the writer and to widen the scope of what is permissible in narrative.  The artist must, however, process the raw material presented by this richer inventory of possibilities, selecting those which taste admits whether the decisions be conscious or intuitive.  Fruits of this new freedom are apparent in the devices of magic realism and in metafiction.  Breton had rejected the therapeutic value of dreams claimed by Freudian analysis, but maintained their aesthetic value, a claim which has proven largely fruitless in practice.  His story about Saint-Pol-Roux posting a sign outside his bedchamber declaring “the poet is working” (14) is delightful, but implies nothing about the poet’s actual writing routine.  Far from recognizing the craftsmanship and care that produces worthwhile art, Breton provocatively (and simplistically) claims that the waking state is “a phenomenon of interference” and calls for “sleeping logicians” and “sleeping philosophers.” (12)

     According to Breton what limits the artist, in his terms what keeps “the flag of imagination furled,” is an unjustified “fear of madness.” (6)  Since Breton’s manifesto, the art world has cultivated an appreciation for “outsider art,” what Dubuffet called art brut, many of the most celebrated works of which were made by people diagnosed with major mental illness.  The reader may wonder whether Breton learned anything from contact with people suffering from major mental illness.  To him mad people “derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination,” indeed “they enjoy their madness,” (5) generalizations which would scarcely be consistent with what psychiatric workers and the families of the afflicted observe.  While the art of people like Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger is indeed impressive and beautiful, that is simply because they are outstanding artists, not because of their illness.   On the other hand, Breton notes with satisfaction that Robert Desnos’ drawings were taken to be the work of an insane person, though the artist was not, in fact, mad. (23) 

     Breton names “psychic automatism” as the very heart of Surrealism (26), and “automatism” in English or French can only mean production without conscious control.   The most important element of his free-writing with Soupault is that they make no revisions. (24)  He emphasizes “the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (26)  Surrealism thus, by only a slight elaboration, became associated with altogether chance operations, the sort called “aleatory” by Werner Meyer-Eppler in 1955.  The notion that a discerning judgment is an obstacle can be entertained only by those who have never devoted prolonged attention to works produced without conscious craftsmanship.. 

     Finally, Breton fancies that wisdom resides in the insights of small children, another Romantic notion straight from Wordsworth.  According to him to find inspiration, one need only “tum back toward his childhood.” (3)  Yet this enlightened early stage is undone by education.  “At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales.” (15)  Some writers, such as Chatterton and Rimbaud, are the more celebrated for writing done in their teens, and parents are fond of quoting their clever sayings of their offspring, but no art whatever by young children is preserved and enjoyed. 

     The barrenness of all these resources – dreams, insanity, suspension of judgement, and the mind of early childhood --  is transformed to luxuriant fruitfulness, however, when Breton’s ideas are read as metaphorical gestures, as figures of speech.  In this rhetorical way, he is recommending writing as weighted with significance as dreams, as daring and innovative as the moves of a schizophrenic’s mind, as unpredictable as randomness, and as fresh and attractive as a child’s imagination.  Reading the manifesto in this way produces ideas far less provocative and dramatic but far more defensible.

     While Breton’s condemnation  of rational cognitive processes pervades the manifesto throughout, providing a polemical froth that he never cares to justify, the real innovation of Surrealism, the acceptance of underdetermined metaphors had more lasting influence.   Many critics and readers are, like Breton, susceptible to “the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations.” (26)  In support he offers the testimony of Apollinaire (who recommended figures of speech with an “extreme degree of immediate absurdity” which “upon closer scrutiny” which may “give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world.” (24) 

     Even more explicit is the prescription he quotes from Reverdy.

 

     It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.

     The more the relationship between the two Juxtaposed realities is distant and true) the stronger the image will be-the greater its emotional power and poetic reality. (20)

 

While clearly going too far in advocating such “modern” images by claiming that there is a direct correspondence between “distance” and value, this formulation states the principle unmistakably.

     Breton proceeds then to provide an example of his own, saying that the apparently meaningless phrase "There is a man cut in two by the window," occurred to him quite clearly but without any cause in prior thought or experience, straight from the unconscious he would have his readers believe. (21)   This verbal “apparition” then stimulates “a whole series of phrases” coming into his consciousness without reflection or intention.  The reader has nothing but Breton’s enthusiasm to indicate that the image has any meaning or that this concatenation of words has the slightest value.

     Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” is less a statement of aesthetic theory or a handbook for practice than a pose, a work of art on its own, regardless of its “truth” or “usefulness.”  As a statement of what might by now perhaps be labeled the “classic avant-garde,” it is bracing in its cheekiness and provocative in its iconoclasm.  In visual art and in literature, Surrealism’s primary contribution was in fact the admittance of novel and “readerly” metaphors, to an extent far beyond what the Symbolists had dared.  Today art-lovers have become accustomed to the use of such figures of speech, finding them far less puzzling than they had seemed a few generations ago.  When “exquisite corpses” are a recommended elementary school exercise and dream imagery fills music videos the time has perhaps come to define what was new and what is lasting about Breton’s Surrealism.

The Power of Picasso’s Sculpture

     The current show of Picasso’s sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art provides, as all who have commented have noted, a rare opportunity to have a fresh look at the work of the artist who dominated so much of the twentieth century. A considerable number of the works are being shown for the first time in this country, many on loan from the Musée Picasso in Paris. The artist was not trained in sculpture, and he kept many of his three-dimensional works in his own possession – they are often prominent in photographs of his studio. Though never for long a central focus of his work, he regularly returned to work in bronze, pottery, and plaster, often using found objects throughout his lengthy career, and viewing this extraordinary collection of objects does not so much as inspire new insights as remind the critic of why Picasso’s oeuvre is so much more powerful than much art since. The great innovator exemplifies the most classic values: emotional strength, vitality, traditional formal aesthetics, and a sort of soaring and unpredictable spirit that might emerge in one moment as wit and in another as insight. Even while participating in Cubism, primitivism, Surrealism, and socially conscious art, Picasso reminds us with the deft dodges and relentless dashes of his unique sensibility. His work could be invigorated by a manifesto yet it would never be contained within the confines of any theoretical program. In our own belatedness, even measured against a hundred years ago, I fear that nothing retains the power to arrest the viewer in the same way. Even were such impact possible today, few artists could make the kind of commanding use of space as one sees Picasso doing here in brand new ways in every room of the exhibit.
     As abstraction arose in Dada and came to dominance in New York following World War II, Picasso explored its possibilities but always retained links to figuration. No admirer of Arp’s voluptuously biomorphic forms or Brancusi’s elegant imaginative leaps can doubt the potential for emotional power in altogether abstract work (familiar as well to listeners to Beethoven quartets), but for Picasso ever since his Cubist portraits, the tension between the artist’s view of a real-world object and the viewer’s is a significant element in the work . Drawing a pencil line on a brown paper bag, piling sand in the middle of a room, or sitting opposite a stranger in a gallery (no matter how prestigious the space) do not demand any investment of artistic intention nor can they offer significant aesthetic pleasure.
     One hundred and forty works, nearly one fifth of Picasso’s sculptures, are on display in New York. Every viewer will have passionate favorites. Convinced that the value of each work of art is not inherent and automatic but rather is constituted in the consumer’s encounter with it, the most precise data on this show is perhaps contained in my reactions to individual pieces.
     Guitar (1914) is a Cubist painting but burst into three dimensions, its refraction of representation combatted by its utter poise in placement, its serene symmetry reminiscent of great paintings such as the 1932 painting Girl Before a Mirror or even, for all its dynamic tension, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907. The use of a musical instrument as subject is emblematic of the artist’s life in Montmartre, suggesting art, beauty, leisure, cafes, and dance. Rendered in sheet metal and wire, as much assemblage as sculpture, its position hanging on the wall makes it seem partly a canvas while its shadows in the clear gallery lighting insist on its volume, thrust, and harmonic balance. The artist has established a firm beachhead on the margins of genre itself.
     The painted bronze absinthe glasses of 1914 (with ready-made tin spoons), on the other hand, are a tour de force of anti-art, constructed in defiance of tidy art school design prettiness. The “glass” itself with its Cubist multiplication of surfaces has become clunky and crude, quite unlike those made of glass. They are painted with simple designs that might have come from the most archaic pottery. Yet their impression as one views each of the six in turn accumulates to mutate becoming complex, playful, and dynamic. The viewer recalls the same object surrounded by other artifacts of cafe life in the 1911 painting Glass of Absinthe.
     Woman in the Garden( 1929-30), one of the rejected designs the artist submitted for Apollinaire’s gravesite, is likewise elegant and lyrical. The inherently weighty iron looks as though it is blowing in the wind and might take off at any moment. Open space is an element at least as important as metal here, and many of the iron portions are so thin as to approach the character of lines. Picasso again displays wit and discernment in his use of found objects and includes rounded forms in the shape of philodendron leaves to soften the otherwise prickly texture of a piece that, in its total impact, is suggestive of the poet’s energetic imagination or of a soul in flight.
     The Bull (1958) is breathtaking: at once monumental in the husky torso and large head yet lyrical as any line drawing in the curves of leg and horn. And in the middle of the elegance every bit as demanding as a Matisse design, a pair of witty complications compete for attention: the infantile three dots for a face gazing at the viewer from archaic times and childhood and a tree branch, seemingly casual but in fact the axis of the composition. Here one sees art brut and objets trouvés as no mere theoretical assertions but as tools in the artist’s inventory of possibilities, intentionally employed to produce a calculated effect that maximizes allusive associations ranging from Neolithic bullheads through the Minotaur to Catalan bullfighting and the rich possibilities offered by parallels in the artist’s earlier and later work, including other pieces in the same exhibit: the bull’s head made of a bicycle handlebars and seat and a ceramic bull seemingly from the dawn of time with beautifully swelling forms and topped with schematic designs.
     I appreciate the Head of a Warrior (1933) with its look of goofy eternal outrage, its tennis balls for eyes and off-kilter Trojan helmet, but the plaster heads of Marie-Thérèse seem to me less eloquent. The deformation in the 1931-2 Head of a Woman plasters strike me as evasive or perhaps just wandering. In my eyes the one The Museum of Modern Art owns is the best of the lot, its evocation of antiquity freshened and flavored by Cubism and Surrealism. On the whole, though, I prefer the classically balanced painting of the same model from 1932-4 (and the canvases featuring her from later in the decade). (I may have simply overdosed at the four “Heads,” a “Bust,” and a dozen other representations of the woman in one room together, reminding me that a single visit to a show so grand may be misleading.)
     The show offers many other pleasures and revelations. A collection of casually collected and painted pebbles and pottery shards situates the viewer at the beginning and end of time, recalling the pleasure and mystic significance with which children can endow any objects through artistic manipulation. In a sly reference to the paintings by Renoir, Seurat, Cézanne, Gaugin and others, generally so pretty, Picasso’s The Bathers (1956) is instead an installation of lumber yard scraps looking sufficiently outsider to put me in mind of the temporary pieces people used to erect on the Oakland approach to the Bay Bridge. Even familiar works take on new significance in this rich context. The museum’s own 1950 She-Goat (which I have been at pains to call on every time I visit) is a veritable fertility deity with its swollen body (formed on a wicker basket) and udders (two ceramic jugs).
     The reviewers have pulled out all the stops in their praise of the show: “staggering,” “dumbfounding,” “magnificent,” “a work of art in its own right,” and I need add no superlatives. In the broadest sense, Picasso’s Sculpture reminds every viewer what art is about, and every admirer of Picasso what is peculiarly his in twentieth century art. For one viewer at least, it was also a reminder of a time when the avant-garde’s power to shock, to challenge, and to surprise was fructifying and productive of new meaning and unsuspected beauty. Now, as techniques more radical than Picasso’s have become altogether mainstream in universities, galleries, and museums, when artists receive foundation grants to execute pieces using the fossilized remnants of avant-garde technique, the aesthetic payoff has become piddling indeed. Picasso in the end reminds us of the potential strength of art in a way that cannot be denied by a viewer with open eyes.

The Fetish of the Primitive in Twentieth Century Art

This is a work in progress, the current draft of a lecture I will deliver in the spring or summer at the Seligmann Center’s Robert Fagan Library which includes a substantial share of books describing non-European art. Kurt Seligmann himself not only traveled around the world in 1936 but made a further trip to the American Pacific Northwest in 1938 where he purchased a magnificent totem pole now on display at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.


     The visitor to my home will see West African carvings from Benin and Urhobo artists, masks from the Tarahumara of the Mexican Sierra Madre Occidental, weavings from the Maghreb, a Cambodian wooden Buddha, set among dozens of other artifacts collected during a lifetime of travel. Doubtless these are simple souvenirs like the decals of Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon people used to place in their car windows, yet to my mind they also provide a potent reminder of the nature of art, displayed as they are among contemporary drawings and paintings, many by my wife or by friends and acquaintances. Thus I am no scholar claiming a fictitious objectivity; rather I am myself a participant in the fetishization I mean to discuss. Far from casting doubt on my conclusion, this involvement seems to me to provide life and blood to my inquiry.
     The articulation of connections between the twentieth century artistic avant-garde and the idea of the primitive is hardly a simple pattern of influence or inspiration. The revaluation of so-called “primitive art” [1] as well as folk art, outsider art, and children’s art by sophisticated European artists, critics, and intellectuals has been a significant influence in poetry and music as well as visual art. In many cases the use of “the primitive” requires little or no specific reference to indigenous art but signifies primarily either a rebellious inversion of received ideas or a more general claim to artistic freedom. In fact, the primitive has been used as a fetish, very much in the historical and anthropological use of the word which originally, like poem, meant simply an artificially constructed object, which is to say, a work of art, but which was used by Portuguese mariners to describe West African objects charged with power by human imagination. Just as the Africans infused their masks and charms with juju, and Polynesians with mana, so, in turn, the European artists gave those same objects a new sort of force, replacing the contempt with which their white ancestors had viewed the “superstition” of what seemed lower races, with respect and even awe. The art was cut free from the world-view of its creators and made to serve instead the purposes of its modern discoverers.
     Though many in the nineteenth century subscribed to an evolutionary view of human development in which the most recent developments were considered the “highest,” a significant faction of artists dissented, finding value in what was generally rejected or ignored. Especially since the Romantic era, the mythic projection of the “primitive” as Other meant that such art was seen by a counter-culture as having greater access to emotion, truth, and the divine than that produced by etiolated Europeans throttled by self-consciousness and decadence. In this polemical reaction against prevailing values, artists conflated all “primitives” into a single category and sometimes also included children, mental patients, peasants, and women as fundamentally similar.
     Such symbolic use of primitive as Other charging it with significance it would not otherwise bear is in fact an ancient and universal topos, far too vast a topic to treat here. It was sophisticated urban Greeks that invented the poetic pastoral, presenting poetry with shepherds as personae, sometimes for comic effect, but often as ideal lovers. Theocritus was an Alexandrian but wrote in the voice of a Sicilian shepherd, and one of the themes of Classical pastoralism is the superiority of rural life to that of the corrupt cities. For Ovid the primal age was Golden without armies, judges, or even labor. [2] It was to this mythic era that Rousseau refers in The Social Contract which opens “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” His Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men maintains, as Engels was to do a century later, that originally men lived in a utopian communist state and that private property is the source of classes and inequality.
     During the Romantic Era the polarity received renewed attention. The Romantics privileged emotion and intuition over rationality, spontaneity over craft, originality over tradition, and the primitive over the civilized. Thus in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth says he has decided to “chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men [that is to say, not in literary or learned language].” He goes on, “Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.” [3]
     The celebration of the “primitive” was evident as well in the new-found attention and respect oral literature received from Percy in England, Burns in Scotland, Herder, von Arnim, Brentano, and the Grimm brothers in Germany. The nationalist impetus during the nineteenth century led to the recognition and use of folk motifs in music by composers such as Lvov, Chopin, Sibelius, and Dvořák the last of whom declared that "In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music." [4] Meanwhile on the level of popular culture minstrel shows were the leading form of musical entertainment in nineteenth century America. [5]
     With the growth of colonialism, knowledge about the actual circumstances of other societies became more widespread and the curious could view non-European artifacts, not in art museums but in new institutions whose galleries were entirely devoted to ethnographic displays. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaigns led to the popularity of “oriental” scenes which increased in popularity throughout the century in both France and Britain, particularly as an avenue of presenting “harem” scenes or other female nudes. [6] By the end of the nineteenth century not only had European museum collections of colonial art swollen; in addition, the general public was exposed to such work at expositions such as the 1889 Paris World’s Fair and the 1908 Franco-British show in London which included “indigenous villages.” [7]
     Scholars had, for the first time, sufficient fairly accurate information about oral cultures to generalize in such works as Primitive Culture (1871) by E. B. Tylor, the “father of cultural anthropology,” James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890), and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910). As the title of Lévy-Bruhl’s work reveals, these authors generally took an evolutionary approach, regarding the thought processes of the societies they studied as quite different from those of the moderns studying them. [8]
    A significant number of artists and intellectuals accepted this sort of conventional judgment, but reversed the values, preferring the primitive. For this reason artists in France left the metropolis for Pont-Aven in Brittany, thinking it more backward and thus Edenic. Long before setting out for the South Seas, Gauguin wrote “I love Brittany. I find something savage, primitive here.” [9] He was joined by Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, and others, while German artists were forming similar colonies for the same reasons in Worpswede and Neu Dachau. These artists were in general not seeking to imitate folk art styles; they sought instead the inspiration of what seemed a more elemental lifestyle. Thus Gauguin, speaking of his “Vision after the Sermon,” said, ““I believe I have achieved a great rustic superstitious simplicity in these figures.” [10] Gauguin proudly declared his satisfaction with a village where, as he said, “I live like a peasant and am known as a savage.” [11]
     But the fact was that Brittany had already become a favored spot for British and American second homes as well as for the occasional artist, and it soon seemed too civilized for Gauguin. He traveled to Tahiti and then to the Marquesas. Among the artists who sought in their travels a first-hand look at “the primitive” were Matisse, who spent time in Algeria and Morocco, Kokoschka in Tunisia, Pechstein who followed Gauguin to Tahiti, and Nolde who visited the Far East and New Guinea. Meanwhile they and others looked with a new eye during their visits to museum collections such as those at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro which attracted the attention of Picasso and others. [12] Further, by 1905 Matisse, Vlaminck, and Derain had all purchased African art for their own collections. [13]
     Artists of the Blaue Reiter group protested “the contemptuous gesture with which connoisseurs and artists have to this day banished all artistic forms of primitive cultures to the fields of ethnology or applied art is amazing at the very least” [14] Marc, Burliuk, and others labeled themselves “savages,” (just as slightly earlier artists had been called les fauves) [15] while in Russia Shevchenko called Neoprimitivism “a profoundly national phenomenon.” [16]
     For the Surrealists Freud’s concept of the unconscious placed a sort of primitive realm within every person’s psyche, reachable by dreams, by art, and by chance operations, but which are as well immediately available in the primitive. There they thought they might find “manifestations of uninhibited desire” and techniques to further “the integration of the sacred in their everyday world.” [17] Breton even operated a shop Gradiva which sold non-European art as did Éluard on a smaller scale. Michel Leiris participated in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti that brought thousands of objects from Africa to France. Max Ernst created a myth of his own shamanic rebirth as “a magician” “seeking to find the myth of his time.” [18] Their attitude was reflected in a map of “the world in the time of the Surrealists” in which Europe is insignificant and Oceania both central and immense. [19] Many classic Surrealist techniques such as invention of automatic writing, trance, and the invention of myth and ritual were considered to mirror practices of primitive cultures.
     In spite of this profound and consistent interest in primitive art among generations of moderns, actual stylistic borrowing is rare indeed. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century artists rebelled against the illusionist realism of academic painting by stressing the flat and decorative surfaces they perceived in Japanese woodcuts and Oceanic ornamentation in what Dujardin called Cloisonnism. The schematic planes of some African masks clearly encouraged Cubist portraiture. Yet even these cases cause and effect is very difficult to demonstrate convincingly. According to Robert Goldwater’s pioneering study Primitivism in Modern Art (1938), artists used the primitive precedent to ratify or reinforce what they were already doing. [20] The groundbreaking Negro Art Exhibition at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery curated by Marius de Zayas was designed to open viewers to modern art rather than to educate them about Africa. In the pamphlet he wrote for the exhibit de Zayas says, “Negro art has reawakened in us a sensibility weakened by education.” Though itself a “product of the ‘Land of Fright,’ created by a mentality full of fear and completely devoid of the faculties of observation and analysis,” African art resembles the most modern in that it is “intensely expressive” rather than “natural.” [21]
     Primitivism in poetry proves an instructive parallel to that in visual art. Occurring later, due doubtless to the lag in the availability of oral texts in comparison with sculpture from the same regions, the valorization of the primitive by writers once begun went hand in hand with that by painters. After a vogue for the archaic in the Romantic era that produced such faux semi-primitives as Macpherson’s Ossian and Chatterton’s Rowley, [22] the interest in foundational national epics led to Lönnrot stitching together the Kalevala and Longfellow’s composition of Hiawatha. In Une Saison en Enfer Rimbaud had declared as a battle-cry, “The pagan blood returns!” [23] shortly before he departed for the African bush. D. H. Lawrence’s infatuation with Mexico and ancient Etruria and his fierce critique of modern society was informed by his familiarity with Tylor and Frazer.
     The Dadaists celebrated the primitive as part of their drive to overturn all received ideas. Weimar Dadaist Hannah Höch showed her own work, including African-style masks, under the title “From an Ethnographic Museum.” Huelsenbeck invented his own “Negro words” (“’Umba, umba,’ which I roared and spouted over and over again to the audience” [24] is a fair example) and Tzara collected African and Oceanic art and wrote what he called Negro Poems. [25] They performed “les chants nègres” with music, sounds, and dancing of their own invention. Tzara said “My other brother is naïve and good, and laughs. He eats in Africa or along the South Sea Islands . . . Art, in the infancy of time, was prayer. Wood or stone were truth.” [26]
     In the early twentieth century translations of Far Eastern poetry by Pound, Waley, and others had an impact on Imagism comparable to that of African sculpture on Cubism. The best-known Asian poetic traditions are, of course, highly sophisticated. After such individual adventures as Artaud’s visit to the Tarahumara peyotists in Mexico and Paul Bowles’ transcription of the stories of illiterate Moroccans, the quest for primitive poetry led to Jerome Rothenburg’s best-selling Technicians of the Sacred in 1968 to be followed by other anthologies, and then his founding of the journal Alcheringa with Dennis Tedlock two years later.
     Though Tedlock is an academic anthropologist, he is also an initiated shaman among Highland Mayan people (as is his wife Barbara) in Guatemala. Alcheringa published translations of oral texts as well as new poetry by poets such as Gary Snyder and Robert Kelly. Its first issue identified itself as “the first magazine of the world’s tribal poetries,” yet disclaimed scholarly goals, noting that “while its sources will be different from other poetry magazines, it will be aiming at the startling & revelatory presentation that has been common to our avant gardes.” In other words, the “primitives” are to read as though they were contemporary experimentalists despite the fact that the social role of all oral poets guarantees that they be highly conventional traditionalists.
     Rothenburg claimed for the primitive a mystical “sense-of-unity” he believes to have been “shattered” by modern minds. “Revolutionary & limit-smashing” poets are to him “forerunners” in the recovery of such a wholesome unified vision. [27] He lists six areas of common ground between the primitives and his own circle, including orality, “intermedia,” and the poet’s role as shaman. This bias leads to the presentation of texts and events first recorded by anthropologists in such a way to make them resemble happenings or performance art. With this refracting lens, a simple conversation in William R. Geddes’ Nine Dayak Nights in which the tribal people explain quite sensibly that they discard food waste from their stilt houses without carrying it to a dump area because their pigs eat it becomes a “Garbage Event” in which “the participants defend the ‘abandoned beauty’ and ‘town-quality’ of their environment” [28] though in fact the quoted terms are those of the European observer and not those of the natives at all. The primitives again provide an excuse for deviation from the norm and criticism of existing values. Other American poets participating in similar shamanistic ambitions include Michael McClure (whose growlings differ little from the pseudo-African cries of the Dadaists) or the feminist myth-making of Diane di Prima in Loba and Anne Waldman in The Iovis Trilogy.
     In the eighteenth century Schiller had regarded “naïve” poetry expressing a “primal unity of vision,” which the civilized, entangled in “artificial relations and situations” could only recall as an ideal. [29] The early twentieth century considered primitive art a model in that it was somehow absolute art, “non-referential,” or “self-contained,” in the words of Carl Einstein “oriented not toward the viewer, but in terms of themselves” [30] though in fact, anthropologists would say that in traditional societies art is far more closely integrated with other realms of people’s lives. According to Wilhelm Worringer all art had been at first abstract, though European art had deviated in its gradually tendency toward mimesis and illusionism. [31] Françoise Gilot recalled Picasso’s saying that what impressed him about African sculpture was that it was made for “a sacred purpose, a magic purpose.” [32] Surely it is no coincidence that the attempt to recover the artist’s vatic role, the search for the divine, for a truth truer than science arose in the wake of the nineteenth century death of god and the rejection of modern capitalist society went hand in hand with the rejection of rationality itself. Nietzsche’s deeply non-logical but creative will passed into the Freudian subconscious. Those who sought truth and beauty in the primitive often were little concerning with actual “primitives”; instead they were expressing a sort of faith in the metaphysical itself, imperiled by science, and asserting the central role of artists in accessing a deeper truth than that of everyday consciousness.
     Looking at the Huichol yarn painting on the wall of my study, or the Haitian wax figures from a Brooklyn botanica behind the glass in a barrister’s bookcase, or, indeed, the works my wife Patricia has brought home from schizophrenic patients and the paintings of my small grandchildren provides me not so much with information about the specific vision of the artists who created these objects as a constant reminder that an accurate concept of art cannot be constructed without the inclusion of such evidence. Art for most people in most times seems in many ways far closer to these “anthropological” artifacts than it is to the work of Raphael or to Marina Abramović, but art is universal because it is at its root an essential need of humanity. We require fetishes to make life livable just as the masked tribal dancer possessed by deity does. Often investigators have sought to recover the “artistic” value of what once was labeled primitive art; it is time to admit the “magical” value of work by contemporary and cosmopolitan minds. The biologists have long known that, since the appearance of our singular species and in every part of the world to which we have spread, our minds are all the same.



1. Of course, the term (as well as others like “savage,” and “barbaric”) is now considered impossibly ethnocentric and outmoded. In the first half of the twentieth century “primitive” was used unselfconsciously, including by Robert Goldwater for his seminal study Primitivism and Modern Art. I employ it here since my focus (like his) is the idea of the primitive; it is for anthropologists to analyze the actual cultures that were once given that label.

2. Metamorphoses, 1, 89 ff.

3. Among other significant pre-Romantics who revalued the primitive is Montaigne whose marvelous essay “On the Cannibals” declares “there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.” Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, Diderot’s Supplement au voyage de Bougainville and most particularly Vico’s New Science were particularly influential in the 18th century.

4. Often quoted, the remark first appeared in an interview in the New York Herald Tribune for May 21, 1893.

5. The trend continued as first ragtime and then jazz enjoyed enormous vogues in the early twentieth century. In the past fifty years that connoisseurs have discovered blues and other folk music including that from India and other parts of the world. Most would agree that West African music is, by way of American jazz, blues, and rock and roll, the most important component of popular music throughout the world today. Compare the prominent place of the music of the socially despised and poverty-stricken Roma in Europe.

6. Many commercially produced postcards of the era and indeed well into the twentieth century featured putatively North African or Arab models in partial or complete undress.

7. Such shows had been part of the Jardin d'acclimatation amusement park in the Bois de Boulogne since 1877. They became de rigeur thereafter in virtually all such exhibitions including Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931). “Natives” were often caged and appeared nude or semi-nude. Since the 1874 introduction of Sami herdsmen to accompany a reindeer exhibit in Hamburg, indigenous people were increasingly featured in zoos. Such attractions were offered in fifteen European zoos by 1900 as well as in America. The trend lasted until 1936 when the last such exhibit was closed in Turin. Artists such as Kirchner and Heckel visited such shows. See Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the Modern,” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993), 63.

8. Lévy-Bruhl’s book was translated into English as How Natives Think (1926). To Tylor all religion was a vestigial survival of primitive modes of thinking.

9. Quoted in Perry 8.

10. Quoted in Perry 18.

11. Quoted in Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, (London: Thames on Hudson, 1994), 26.

12. Picasso’s visit in 1907 occurred 83 after he had painted Demoiselles d’Avignon. In 1928 Georges-Henri Rivière who had ties to the Surrealists became the director of the museum.

13. Perry 55.

14. August Macke, “Masks,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac The Documents of 20th-Century Art, edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc documentary edition by Klaus Lankheit (NY: Viking Press, 1974), 88.

15. The Blaue Reiter Almanac, 61, 72, and elsewhere.

16. See Aleksandr Shevchenko’s Neo-primitivizm (1913). Shevchenko envisioned an art in which influences of Cézanne, Cubism and Futurism would mix with traditional Russian 'folk art' conventions.

17. Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (Routledge: London and New York, 2003), 59. It is telling that, while providing a wealth of historical and biographical data, Tythacott’s detailed study offers little in the way of specific borrowing.

18. Rhodes 174.

19. Published in a special issue of Varietés in 1929 along with writing by René Crevel, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, André Breton, and others. Africa is small. Alaska is huge as is Russia, though perhaps this fact owes more to Communism as to primitivism.

20. Joyce Henri Robinson in a review of Frances S. Connelly’s The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics 1725-1907 in Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 4, No. 1, fall/winter 1999, p. 130 supports Goldwater’s contention that it is more a matter of an “attitude conducive to art” than specific borrowings.

21. Reprinted in Primitivism and Twentieth-century Art: A Documentary History, edited by Jack D. Flam and Miriam Deutch (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2003).

22. Compare with Armand Schwerner’s imitation of Sumero-Akkadian texts in his Tablets (1974).

23. He had originally considered titling the book Livre païen or Livre nègre.

24. Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (Berkeley: University of California, 1991),9. Huelsenbeck says then that Mynheer Ephraim, the landlord of the Cabaret Voltaire, an old sailor, objected that these were not Negro at all and taught Huelsenbeck what he said were authentic African and Oceanic chants.

25. Reprinted in a translation by Piette Joris, Alcheringa II,1 (Boston: 1976), pp. 76-114.

26. Reprinted in Vassiliki Kolotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou’s Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 281.

27. Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1969), xxii.

28. Rothenberg 108. Cf. W. R. Geddes, Nine Dayak Nights (London: Oxford UP, 1967), 19-20.

29. See Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.
30. See Carl Einstein, African Sculpture (1915).
31. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1908).
32. Francoise Gilot and Carleton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 266.

Tim West

     I recently heard of the death of Tim West, an outsider (though educated) artist I had known in the late sixties. Toward the end of his life, West and his work found partisans, and he had a few shows; some comment, as well as samples of his paintings, is available online. In my experience, though, West was primarily a real-life performance artist, and his few late videos indicate that the show lasted as long as its star. West had an authentic Ozarks accent, and he was taped shortly before his death discussing his work in a shirtless crouch with what looks like a large piece of bark stuffed into his pants. In the video he ascribes the motive for art to “the hunting instinct.” saying, “The artist don’t want to kill it, he wants to record it, and that feels better, because he hasn’t had to kill anything. Like if I make a picture of a woman, I possess that woman, or at least her image.”
     When Patricia and I moved to Carbondale in southern Illinois in the spring of 1968, we brought a few references, names and telephone numbers to connect with the local hip scene. One of these, given to us by a gifted young writer, a paranoid bisexual redneck with a fondness for chains and painted china who had once quietly reclined on his Chicago sofa after setting his apartment on fire, provided contact information for Tim West. Eager to enter a new scene, I gave West a call and was answered by a rhythmic, swinging Southern voice, speaking sometimes in rhyme. “Come on over . . . you got nothing to lose, nothing to lose, ‘cept maybe your shoes.”
     He lived with his mother who taught English at Southern Illinois University in an odd courtyard of identical twenties bungalows that looked like it had somehow strayed from southern California. The West place, though, was easily distinguished from its neighbors. It was filled with junk, though among the heaps useful objects could be discerned here and there. West himself was unwashed and unshaven and completely at home. He had to swing over to his high hammock with the aid of a rope fixed to the ceiling. His mother’s territory was scarcely tidier and she spoke in the same hermetic coded rhythms. Cold winds entered through holes in the walls. West had been considered something of an artistic prodigy in his youth – the Museum of Modern Art purchased a piece of his when he was eighteen -- but after graduating from university he found he had neither aptitude nor interest in making a living.
     I recall his muttering a good deal about his relationship with his mother, lamenting his capture by “petticoat government,” in his phrase. He escaped what might sometimes have felt like her sporadic supervision and ran with a group of Harley-driving amphetamine aficionados with a weakness for a variety of other mostly petty crimes. Their coterie had a strong homoerotic element that struck me then as incongruous but now seems altogether natural. A number of these guys worked at a small fireworks factory where few other locals would work. Many were sure it would blow up at any minute. The odds of an explosion were certainly increased by the employees.
     West consistently produced art – often representational, sometimes almost conventional – while becoming known as a local character, a danger in the eyes of some, a no-good at best, occasionally being arrested for one thing or another. He always looked as though he had just emerged from one of the area’s long-defunct coal mines. I recall that he had been banned from the local doughnut shop, doubtless for being generally disreputable. He turned up the next day and stood for hours in front of the store’s doorway, holding a lactating cat and sucking her tits, letting cat milk stream down his filthy beard. Had I been the proprietor, I would have been glad to give him a doughnut or two to leave.
     In the video he notes that, after a few second chances and a further scrape with the law, he was told to simply get out of town. He had always spoken of property his father owned in the Arkansas Ozarks, and he decided now was the time to make his move, to leave his circle of “outlaw bikers,” and “pillheads.” “Down here [in Arkansas] I behaved myself, because I knew I’d have to live here the rest of my life.” West became a recluse, probably a lifestyle to which he was well suited. He continued to make art.
     Tim West persisted in following his genius and somehow made it to a ripe age and had some sympathetic attention and even admiration toward the end. He never tried to be practical or prudent. In 1968 I had invited him to our place, a few miles from Carbondale, in the neighboring town of Murphysboro, the county seat of Jackson County, a town with a fine African-American hickory pit ribs place, but where in the year of our Lord 1968, the local tavern continued to keep barrels out back to accommodate its black patrons. After West had left, I realized that he had swiped a cloth cap to which I was more attached than I was to most of my clothes. I knew I would never wear it again, but I am timid enough to be satisfied to contribute the cap and to maintain some distance from the wild imaginative turbulence of Tim West.

Lament for the Loss of the Avant-Garde

     I grew up committed to the avant-garde. Even beyond partisanship, the concept lay at the basis of my structuring of the world. One pole of every opposition was for me animated with life and energy while the other bore the dead weight of reaction: not only art and politics and religion split into camps of the hip and square, old and young, academic and revolutionary – the principle seemed at the time universal. Remember Norman Mailer’s Village Voice lists from the ‘fifties? Bohr’s model of the atom is square, Heisenberg’s hip, etc. (Though, of course, the wave of the future could involve such radical exhumation of the past as pre-Raphaelitism or Pound’s rereading of the troubadours.)
     This whole bipolar opposition is primarily a Romantic myth. In spite of boasts from millennia of artists and writers that they are “making it new,” and in spite of the line of off-beat artists extending back to archaic schizoid shamans, and the ancient world’s wine-drinker poets (in contrast to the soberly craftsmanlike water-drinkers), the idea of bohemia is, like the term, less than two hundred years old. But its course seems already to be run, though practitioners continue to go through the motions that used to épater the bourgeoisie though now these are the very gestures by which they court the embrace of the same establishment.
     Now it is clear from oral and popular genres that art that defends the status quo may be great. Apart from exotic examples like African sculpture and oral epic, the USA’s greatest contributions to world culture may well be in genuinely popular genres: movies and jazz. But if gestures are to carry meaning at all, the cocked snoot must be distinguished from the glad hand.
     In my opinion the last great era of the avant-garde was launched by the dadaists in the early part of the past century and ripened in the great surrealist ventures of the next few decades. Admittedly, even here it was possible for a perversely conservative entrepreneur like Dali to evolve, but surely Franco and the Pope always knew he was a character to keep at arm’s length even if the buyers of his millions of limited editions did not.
     The performances at the Café Voltaire genuinely amazed the public and went near the limit in cracking art’s possibilities. No second appearance of Picabia in a tutu could replicate the first. Beyond sound poetry, what? Not only did these artists do things never dared before in the realm of taste and semiotic manipulation; they were altogether serious in their fierce opposition to those who held economic power. Whether communist like Breton and Huelsenbeck or anarchist like Bunuel, they struggled with the ruling class for control of art.
     Now the Rockefeller Foundation is pleased to fund work that resembles nothing so much as the performance of the Duke and the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn; the largest museums speculate on novelty; we find that the CIA promoted abstract expressionism as part of the cold war, and the once-radical designs of the Bauhaus embody the glittery apparition of American wealth in lower Manhattan. Andy Warhol, who seriously took up the task of representing the icons of our culture, not just soup cans and celebrities, but crack-ups as well, began in corporate advertising and spawned the Interview sensibility which fawns on the rich and finds those who are vicious as well (such as the Marcoses and the Shah of Iran) particularly piquant Mapplethorpe, too, for all the fuss once attendant on his shows, displays flawlessly elegant academic/advertising skills and is attacked only by know-nothings, with everyone in the art world from old line to young lions defending him.
     Even real art brut styles have been easily digested from Rouault to Red Grooms, and what passed a few generations ago for derangement of the senses now sells jeans and cologne on MTV. Conceptual art may have been the last theoretical gasp of the avant-garde, for once everything is assimilated to art, what boundary remains to be challenged? What is the next move?
     I offer no prescriptions for the resuscitation of the avant-garde. Some alternatives are clear: among the more common already current are antiquarianism, deeper probing of sore psychic regions, the sleazier sorts of pop culture, and borrowing from the tribal. I lament the passing of the avant-garde, and suggest we be conscious of its implications. What changes in society, in art, and in their relation have rendered obsolete the idea of an avant-garde, so seminal these past few centuries? Surely among the assassins of the avant-garde are the continuing marginalization of art, the greedy commodification of art processes, and the collapse of radical challenge in non-artistic realms. Under these conditions an active avant-garde would be a zombie-like walking corpse.