The Edges of Surrealism

Abstract

2004 marks the centenary of Salvador Dali's birth. In response, many scholars and collectors are hard at work celebrating the career of this artist who at least in the U.S. and in the U.K. continues to orient how we understand surrealism. Overshadowing even Andr6 Breton's stature as the movement's literary reference-point, Dali's looming presence in the Anglo-American popular imaginary has yielded regrettable consequences. Not only has it made a cartoon of Dali's own work, but it has also helped reduce itself to little more than an exercise in stylistics. Even now, in an era longing to resist the mounting pressures of orthodoxy and fundamentalism, we continue to brand as an orthodoxy of its own, albeit an orthodoxy of the bizarre. In the eyes of its Anglo-American critics, still tends to designate a quaint set of formal practices that produced the movement's unusual, if obfuscatory, visual and verbal works, as well as its broader utopian program of dream and Revolution. This reductive tendency is not so much the fault of either Dalif or Breton, so much as it is the result of their isolation as the movement's essential figures. Indeed, the surrealist writer Rend Crevel once praised Dali explicitly for his radical opposition to formalism, and for his politically useful anti-obscurantism. Breton, likewise, continually stressed the surrealist movement's commitment to resisting orthodoxy, the very notion of surrealism itself evoking a perpetual in consciousness whose methods changed as the movement's participants changed. It is this latter insistence upon change even upon crisis and internal debate that has challenged scholars and critics with the task of defining such an unstable tangle of writers and artists, practices and ideas. Herein, it seems, lies the tendency to isolate Dalif and Breton as