The lay of the land by Paul Warren, with a foreword by Gary Cummiskey

The lay of the land is a flipbook by UK artist Paul Warren, and consists of 12 collages, with a foreword by Gary Cummiskey.

You can read The lay of the land on Issuu.

International Exhibition of Surrealism anthology

 

Immensely honoured to have some poems included in this anthology!

Edited by: Mohsen Elbelasy

Part One: 468 pages

Issued from

La Belle Inutile Editions

Cover by La Sirena Surrealist Group

To order the book :

https://www.lulu.com/.../paperback/product-p2md56.html

This book brings together the textual contributions made on the occasion of the International Surrealist Exhibition in Cairo in February 2022. This exhibition brought together contributors from many countries in Europe, North America and South America, and most particularly from the Middle East and North Africa.

Edited by Mohsen Elbelasy

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Ce livre rassemble les contributions textuelles réalisées à l’occasion de l’Exposition Surréaliste Internationale du Caire de Février 2022. Cette exposition a rassemblé des contributeurs de très nombreux pays, et notamment du Moyen Orient et d’Afrique du Nord.

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Este libro reúne las contribuciones textuales realizadas con motivo de la Exposición Internacional Surrealista en El Cairo en febrero de 2022. Esta exposición reunió a colaboradores de muchos países de Europa, América del Norte y América del Sur, y en particular de Oriente Medio y el Norte de África.

With collective texts by

Maison André Breton - La Rose Impossible

La Rose Impossible

MENA Surrealist Group

LA Belle Inutile groupe La Belle Inutile Editions

La Sirena Surrealist Group

Sulfur "Surrealist Jungle"

Chrysopoeia international Surrealist Group /Union /Cooperative

KAREDAS Éditions � BELLEVILLE galaxie

Fresh dirt surrealist group

And individuals texts by individual surrealist poets and writers and artists

Index :

Penelope Rosemont (USA)

Will Alexander (USA)

Abdul Kader Al Janabi (France /Iraq)

Allan Graubard (USA)

Pierre Petiot (France)

Laurent Doucet (France)

Mohsen L Belasy (Egypt)

Michael Löwy (France)

John Welson (Wales)

Thomas Mordant (Belgium)

Ody Saban (France)

Ghadah Kamal (Egypt)

Heller Levinson (USA)

Michel the seer ميشيل الرائي ( Irak)

Stephen Kirin (ENGLAND)

Mitchell Pluto (USA)

Nelly Sanchez @(France)

Latif Yılmaz (TURKEY)

Miguel de Carvalho (Portugal)

Eva Nicky (France)

Amirah Gazal (Costa-Rica)

Argenis Herrera (Costa-Rica)

Dale Houstman (USA)

Doug Campbell (Scotland)

Rik Lina(Netherlands)

John Bradley (USA)

Philippe Bouret (FRANCE)

Craig S Wilson (USA)

Gary Cummiskey (SOUTH AFRICA)

J Karl Bogartte (USA)

David Nadeau (Canada)

Daniel O'Reilly (Spain)

LaDonna Smith (USA)

Dawn Juan (CANADA)

Ola Hussamo (SYRIA)

Fathi mhadhbi (TUNISIA)

Fariel Shafee (IRAN)

Mo’men Samir (EGYPT)

Reda Ahmed (Egypt)

Kent Johnson (USA)

Gregg Simpson (USA)

Tim White (AUSTRALIA)

Richard Misiano-Genovese(USA)

Willem Den Broeder (NEANDERTHALS)

Darren Thomas (WALES)

Taya King (England)

Giorgia Pavlidou (USA/GREECE)

Moheeb Barghouti Moheeb Bargotiuy (PALATINE)

Magdalena Benavente (CHILE)

Zazie /Evi Moechel (AUSTURIA)

Verónica Cabanillas Samaniego (PERU)

Catherine Belkhodja (FRANCE)

Uche Nduka (USA)

Hoda Hussein (EGYPT)

Ammar Abdel Khalek عمار عبد الخالق (IRAK)

JD Nelson (USA)

RW Spryszak (USA)

Naoual Charif نوال شريف (MOROOCO)

James Sebor (USA)

Cristina Botta (Italy)

Salah Faik (Irak)

Hager Youssef (EGYPT)

Daniel Y. Harris (USA)

Irene Koronas (USA)

Final artwork by Janice Hathaway (USA)

International exhibition of surrealism

Immensely honoured to have some poems selected for this anthology, edited by Mohsen Elbelasy. Its 460 pages also include work by writers and artists such as Penelope Rosemont, Will Alexander, Uche Nduka, Matta, Giorgia Pavlidou, Magdalena Benavente, Darren Thomas, J. Karl Bogartte, Craig S Wilson, Ghadah Kamal Ahmed, Allan Graubard, Ghadah Kamal Ahmed and Mohsen himself.

In the company of Egyptian surrealists

 In Cairo, December 2012, with Ghadah Kamal Ahmed and Mohsen El Belasy of the Egyptian and North African Surrealist Group.

Interview with British artist Paul Warren in The Odd Magazine (Oddity 25)

 

Paul Warren is an artist and illustrator with an interest in surrealism and abstract art. He works in a variety of different mediums, including collage. Paul's work has been published by Dumpster Fire Press, The Odd Magazine and Word Vomit Zine.  He has online galleries at Deviant Art and Instagram. He lives in Daventry, England.

You live in the town of Daventry, Northamptonshire, in England. What is the art scene like in England these days? What is the support for visual art? Is there a fair bit of regionalism?

I think the art scene in England is pretty staid these days. It only exist in most people’s lives when Banksy sprays something on a wall somewhere.  All of the big exhibitions are London-based, with a corporate sponsor. From time to time something interesting will pop up in an independent gallery away from the capital. I usually find out about these after the event. National media focus only on the big exhibitions: Monet or Hockney, for example. Living here these things easily pass you by! So yes, I think there is some regionalism. Read more. 

What is surrealist poetry? An introductory talk by Gary Cummiskey

The following is the English version of an introductory talk I gave at a surrealist poetry event I participated in the Dai Art Gallery, Zamalek, in Cairo, on 14 December, 2022. The event was hosted by Mohsen L Belasy and Ghadah Kamal Ahmed.

An Arabic translation of the talk appears in Sulfur 'Surrealist Jungle'.

What is surrealist poetry?

It was about a month ago that Mohsen asked me to give a talk for this evening on ‘What is surrealist poetry?’ My reply at the time was that this was an almost impossible question to answer comprehensively, and that I was not sure if I could answer it. Now it is a month later, and I still do not have a comprehensive answer. And besides, I am suspicious of answers, and much prefer questions.

What is surrealist poetry? Well, among the French-language poets, we may have read Breton, Éluard, Péret and the great post-Second World War poet Joyce Mansour, who was Egyptian. 

Joyce Mansour

When we read their work we should get an idea of what constitutes surrealist poetry. And among the English poets, if we read the early work of David Gascoyne or Philip O’Connor, or that of Roger Roughton or Roland Penrose, we may get an idea of what constitutes surrealist poetry to the English. And then in the US, there is the work of the great Philip Lamantia – ‘the voice that rises once in a hundred years’ – as Breton said about him, or the work of the contemporary surrealist poet Will Alexander, and also the late Ronnie Burk. Unfortunately I cannot speak about surrealist poetry in Latin America, other European countries such as Spain, Portugal or Romania, or even countries such as Egypt, because I am not knowledgeable enough.

Philip Lamantia

But to get back to the question. For me, a problem with trying to explain something, to define it, is to risk limiting and restricting it – and that is the exact opposite of what surrealism has always been about.  If we say, for example, as is usually said, that surrealist poetry is characterised by dream imagery, then we are saying that surrealist poetry should contain dream imagery.  But is that true? And if we say that surrealist poetry is the result of automatic writing, then we are saying that surrealist poetry must have been written quickly and without conscious intervention or revision. But we know that is not true – Breton himself rejected automatic writing as far back as 1930. And neither Aragon, Char, nor Éluard – the great poets of surrealism –  ever practised automatic writing.

For myself, as much as I admire Breton, Éluard and Péret among the French-language surrealist poets, I much prefer the work of the more borderline or renegade surrealists – poets such as Artaud, Prévert, and some of the members of Le Grand Jeu, such as René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. None of these poets produced poetry that can be immediately recognised or labelled as surrealist. That is because their poems do not have the outward characteristics of what is considered surrealist poetry.

René Daumal

And in the post-Second World War period, moving into the 1950s and 1960s, I admire the work of the PANic movement – Arrabal, Jodorowsky, and Topor. There is the story of how Jodorowsky travelled from Chile to France determined to rescue surrealism, and when he finally met Breton, he was dismayed to find that the great leader of surrealism did not like rock music (actually Breton did not like any music!), science fiction, or comics. And so Jodo decided to form PANic.

 And among the American poets, much as I admire Lamantia, I also have tremendous admiration for the work of Bob Kaufman and Marty Matz, who are more usually associated with the beats than with surrealism. Then there is the psychedelic work of the poet, photographer, and film maker Ira Cohen, who would rigorously shake off any label, whether  ‘surrealist’ or ‘beat’.

Bob Kaufman

Ira Cohen

And then what do we make of the poetry of the US surrealist Ted Joans, who declared ‘Jazz is my religion, and surrealism my point of view’? As much as many of his poems are dedicated to surrealists, such as Joyce Mansour, with whom he collaborated, or reference surrealism or surrealists – a fairly famous one is about Breton – they generally do not have the characteristics of what we would expect from ‘surrealist poetry’. They are closer to jazz poetry, and indeed, Joans’s poetry seems more influenced by jazz than by surrealism. He is as frequently referred to as a jazz poet as he is referred to as a surrealist poet. He is seen by some as one of the fathers of spoken-word poetry. Yet Breton called him ‘the only authentic African-American surrealist of the hippie generation in America’.

 I have also been asked about surrealism in South Africa. Well, there is not much happening with regard to surrealism in South Africa, and certainly not amongst poets. One notable figure, however, was Sinclair Beiles, about whom I compiled a book, titled Who was Sinclair Beiles? Sinclair is better known for being a collaborator on the book of cut-ups called Minutes to Go, with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso. He also helped with the editing and publication of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. But he was also tremendously influenced by dada and surrealism, and while he was in Paris, in the 1950s, he met Breton and Tzara. He also later became very close friends with the Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis, who edited Sinclair’s selected poems, titled A South African Abroad. There is a long poem of Sinclair’s called Illuminations in White Tobacco Smoke, which is based on a poem by Tzara and dedicated to Artaud. In a documentary in the mid-1990s, Sinclair dismissed much South African poetry as ‘social realism’ and said he regarded his own work as surrealist. 

Sinclair Beiles

Incidentally, Sinclair once gave a poetry reading here in Egypt, at a Grateful Dead concert, when they performed at the pyramids in Giza in 1978.

 Well, I realise this talk has been rather meandering and so I want to return to the beginning, to the question ‘What is surrealist poetry’? Because, as I have already said,  I am aware of the dangers of definition, and I am even more aware of the danger of confusing outward characteristics with substance. In my opinion there is much contemporary, or near-contemporary, surrealist poetry that too often reads like a translation from the 1920s French. Such surrealist poetry is hardly innovative, but rather imitative, and if you want to bring a political slant into it, you could say that such poetry is more reactionary than revolutionary. It is such poetry that tucks surrealism safely away in museums and on to the walls of corporate boardrooms. It also reminds me of something that Sinclair Beiles wrote, that in its quest for unusual images, much (not all) surrealist poetry had become ‘mannered’, producing ‘beautiful seashells devoid of life’.

Ted Joans

In closing, I would like the quote the words of Ted Joans – words he uttered when I met him in Johannesburg in early 1994. Those words were: ‘The fantasy fades, but the surrealism remains’. He did not explain what he meant by that, but for me it is a matter of pointing out that the outward characteristics of ‘typical’ surrealist poems  – with images of oranges eating horses and eyebrows climbing over bannisters  (and those are my images, by the way, so you can’t use them!) –– will perhaps not fade as such, but become, in the words of Sinclair, ‘beautiful seashells devoid of life’. But the substance of surrealist poetry –– the spirit of surrealism – will remain.

 

 

 

 

 

A Dye Hard Interview: Armando Fragale: Completely autonomous

Armando Fragale is a multifaceted artist born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1985. He is a painter, illustrator, filmmaker, actor, musician, writer, poet, designer, and producer who works in various mediums. He developed the artistic technique called Drivage and founded the art movement Openism. He has shown his work all over the world and has also collaborated with a wide array of artists in various art forms. Notable exhibitions he has been involved in have been Cosmic Unity: Occult Art and Music in Latin America in New York, International Surrealism Exhibition in Cairo/Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus: The Liminal and the Marvellous, in Dublin. He also runs a record label Wraith Productions, which he started in 2005. 

DH: I believe you were already drawing when you were a child. Do you remember when you first started? Have you had any formal art training? 

 AF: It all came about so early on as a child, and it all started with drawing from the moment I picked up a pencil. I’ve had formal art training at university, but I chose my own path in all of this with what I do, so I consider myself a self-taught artist. Read more. 

Surrealist poetry night at Dai Art Gallery, Zamalek, Cairo

 

Completely autonomous: an interview with Armando Fragale in The Odd Magazine 24

Armando Fragale is a multifaceted artist born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1985. He is a painter, illustrator, filmmaker, actor, musician, writer, poet, designer, and producer who works in various mediums. He developed the artistic technique called Drivage and founded the art movement Openism. He has shown his work all over the world and has also collaborated with a wide array of artists in various art forms. Notable exhibitions he has been involved in have been Cosmic Unity: Occult Art and Music in Latin America in New York, International Surrealism Exhibition in Cairo/Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus: The Liminal and the Marvellous, in Dublin. He also runs a record label Wraith Productions, which he started in 2005. Read the interview here.

Five poems published in Sulfur, 'Surrealist Jungle'

 In a bumper month or so, I now have had five poems published in the online journal Sulfur, 'Surrealist Jungle'.

Sulfur is published by the Egyptian and North African surrealist group.

The five poems are:

Out on the street

Snap

Cardboard kings

Still now

Nowhere rooms

and they can be read here.

'Poetry should be a way of resisting commodification and superficiality': An interview with Lee Beckworth by Gary Cummiskey

Writer artist and musician Lee Beckworth aka Lee Kwo was born in Geelong in 1952/He started writing at 17 and completed a Degree at Deakin University in creative writing and Journalism in 1974/After travels in Europe he moved to Melbourne and completed a Bachelor of Letters in literature and psychology at Melbourne University/ He has published 5 works of fiction and 2 books of poetry/ His interests in music and photography have been expressed through the band Kicks and an exhibition of collages and photography in 2016/

You can read the interview with Lee at The Odd Magazine.

At 42 Rue Fontaine, Paris

Sinclair Beiles on surrealist poetry

'Most surrealist poetry became mannered and in its quest for unusual relationships between words, and ideas, was set down at the expense of feelings and motives. The poems became beautiful seashells devoid of life.'

Sinclair Beiles, from the introduction to Marta Proctor's Offering of fire.

Postcard reproduction of Man Ray's Le Violon d' Ingres

A daisy in the memory of a shark - Pete Winslow

A daisy in the memory of a shark is a collection of poems by little known US surrealist poet Pete Winslow, published by City Lights Books in 1973. Winslow was just 37 when he died the year before as a result of complications following surgery. He had published a handful of small collections since the early 1960s. There is very little information about Winslow on the internet.

Lines from some of the poems in A daisy in the memory of a shark read as follows:

I called the ocean by its first name

I became an eon but a billion years passed in an instant...

A strange wind carries children to the tops of buildings...

How may I become your clothes when you are so lovely nude

This is the problem of the moon

Whose solution is to disappear...

The invisible telephones of the wind are ringing...

I am famous for the beer which flows from my hair...

Morning stretched its layers of light so softly

That hundreds of night creatures caught unaware

Run about on the table while we have coffee...

I bid my life for the girl tasting of poppies...

The murmur of the city is the beginning of the earthquake...

Your eyelids close

And you inspect me with your alternate eyes...

My pillow over my face

Its hair turning my mind to feathers...

My portrait is ill today its hair is falling out...

Ted Joans: in search of the marvellous

On May 7 2003, the 74-year-old African-American beat poet and artist Ted Joans was discovered dead in his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia. It is believed Joans, who was seriously ill with diabetes, had been dead for almost three weeks. The irony that such a gregarious man as Joans should have died alone has been commented on. Yet despite being one of the most colourful, energetic and prolific members of the beat generation, Joans was also probably one of the least known.

Born Theodore Jones in 1928 in Cairo, Illinois, (he later changed the surname to differentiate from the more common spelling) his parents were show people who worked on a Mississippi riverboat. In 1943 his father was murdered by white workers during the Detroit race riots. It was also about this time that he discovered surrealism, which, as he wrote years later, he chose as a weapon to defend himself against ‘abject vicissitudes’ of a racist society.

After graduating from the University of Indiana with a Fine Arts degree in 1951, Joans moved to New York where he settled in the Greenwich Village scene of artists, poets, coffee bars and jazz. He once shared a room with Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker and learned to play the trumpet. By the middle of the decade he had become part of the emerging beat scene, participating in public poetry readings with writers and poets such as Diane di Prima, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as well as fellow African-Americans Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) and Bob Kaufman.

His first poetry collections were published in the late 1950s. After the failure of his first marriage and feeling that the beat scene had become too commercialised, however, Joans set off for France in the first of a series of extensive travels that would also take him to north Africa, Holland, Germany, England and even South Africa. Wherever he went, Joans became immersed in a fervent activity of writing, painting and public reading, dividing regular residences between Timbuktu, Amsterdam and New York.

When Joans visited South Africa in 1994 he gave readings at the Windybrow Theatre in Hillbrow and at Kippies Jazz Club in Newtown. I remember being struck by his warmth and ageing grace, although he hadn’t lost any of his occasional ribald humour. His insistence that poets should focus on ‘writing the poem’, rather feeling restricted by formalist constraints, was true to the spontaneous spirit of jazz and surrealism. His vibrant, charismatic performance reminded me that poetry is a shared, living experience; not words buried alive in a book.

In almost 40 years, Joans published as many titles, the majority of them in small limited editions now out of print. Most probably the only collections still readily available are those published by Calder & Boyers in the early 1970s, A Black Pow-Wow of Jazz Poems and Afrodisia, as well as two recent selected volumes, Teducation (Coffee House Press) and Our Thang (Exstatis Editions), which also featured drawings by Joan’s companion, artist Laura Corsiglia.

Joans’ poetry is influenced by Langston Hughes, André Breton, his fellow beat poets and jazz. It is characterised predominantly by colloquial expressions of black consciousness, revolutionary pride and eroticism. Believing that any revolution based purely on political change was futile, Joans emphasised that liberation was also required from ‘self-inflicted oppressions’, particularly those related to sex. His goal was, as with Breton, ‘human emancipation’.

Although surrealism plays a somewhat marginal a role in his poetry, it is clearly expressed in his art, particularly his collages, which are reminiscent of Max Ernst. "Jazz is my religion," he once said, "and surrealism is my point of view.”

Despite Joans’ numerous publications, he nevertheless remained less known than some of his contemporaries, less anthologised, and certainly less cash flush. Yet for the man who regarded the rhino as his totem animal, he was, as he wrote to writer Jack Foley, "..never in the rat race, only the rhino race in search of the marvellous".

(Published in Sunday Independent, May 2003)

"Something was coming out of my throat..."

"The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.
"There is an instrument called the quena made of human bones. It owes its origin to the worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her bones. The quena has a more penetrating more haunting sound than the ordinary flute.
"Those who write know the process. I thought of it as I was spitting out my heart.
"Only I do not wait for my love to die."

Anais Nin, House of Incest, Peter Owen, 1978.

Reality and Magic

“Everyday life is surrealistic, made of miracles, weird and inexplicable events. There is no borderline between reality and magic.” Alejandro Jodorowsky

French surrealist author Julien Gracq dies aged 97

At the Lycée Claude Bernard in Paris during the 1950s a number of 16-year-olds were fascinated by their history and geography teacher, Monsieur Poirier. He was small, with short hair and dressed in a dark suit. Punctual and efficient, no one ever thought of playing tricks on him. When his teaching was over he gathered up his papers and went away. The reason for the particular interest in him was the discovery that Louis Poirier, who has died aged 97, was in fact Julien Gracq, the novelist, who had won (and refused) the Goncourt prize in 1951.
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Before the Mirror: surrealism in the 21st century

In 2001, the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London hosted the exhibition Surrealism - Desire Unbound. Focusing on the premise that desire was central to the surrealist vision of love, poetry and liberty, the exhibition displayed a comprehensive range of almost 300 paintings, sculptures, objects and documents stemming from the early pre-surrealist dada period through to relatively recent works of the 1970s. 

While passing through the successive 13 rooms/domains of surrealist desire, one was initially introduced to works by Marcel Duchamp, Georgio di Chirico, Man Ray and Francis Picabia before plunging into the delirious surreality of artists such as René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, André Masson, Joan Miró, Aschille Gorky, Hans Bellmer, Meret Oppenheim, Toyen, Paul Delvaux, Roland Penrose, Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst. 

Also on exhibit were works by artists loosely associated with the movement, such as Frida Kahlo and Leonor Fini. 

The exhibition also displayed the recently rediscovered photographs of Claude Cahun, whose work was not exhibited during her lifetime. 

Some of the works on display explicitly revealed the physical side of the surrealists' obsession with sexual desire: highly erotic collages from the Czech surrealist group plus the phallic costume created by Jean Bênoit for The execution of the will of the Marquis de Sade in 1959. Journeying deeper still into the 'darker side' of eroticism was Alberto Giacometti's sculpture Woman with her Throat Cut and Hans Bellmer's photographs of his artificial doll, some of which resembled a mutilated woman's body in erotically suggestive positions - and all this while recordings of gasps and sighs of women having sex were issued from speakers in the walls. 

Documents on display included manuscript pages from André Breton's Nadja, as well as first editions of books by Breton, Paul Éluard, Valentine Penrose, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Péret and René Char. There was a copy of the surrealist journal Medium from the 1950s. 

There were books of pornographic poetry by the poets illustrated with pornographic drawings by the artists. Among documents from various 'ancestors' of surrealism was a letter in minute handwriting on blue paper from the Marquis de Sade to his wife. Sade's will was also on display alongside Bênoit's costume piece. There was also continuous screenings of Luis Buñuel's movie classics Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, followed by Maya Deren's beautiful Meshes of the Afternoon. Overhead projectors threw photographic images onto a large blank wall, punctuated by texts of poems by Louis Aragon or André Breton: 

They tell me over there the beaches are black 

With lava that's gone down to the sea 

And stretch out at the foot of a huge peak smoking with snow 

Under a second sun of wild canaries…

 (André Breton, They tell me over there) 

 Walking away from the exhibition, though, I couldn't help being struck by some ironies. Firstly, that an exhibition devoted to one of the great revolutionary movements of the 20th century should be sponsored by a major international financial group, Morgan Stanley. Also that the exhibition should be swamped by overwhelming hoards of pretentious middle-class art farts that Breton and Co would have despised (or at least according to the myths). 

Another irony was that the organisers of the exhibition stated that surrealism was an art and literary movement that started in the 1920s and ended in the 1960s, when surrealism, or at least the surrealist spirit, is still alive and all around us. 

But these ironies, I suppose, are inevitable. Over the decades corporate capitalism has made a point of being a 'patron of the arts', all in the cause of marketing. Whether the art is comprehensible to them is probably irrelevant. Morgan Stanley's funding of this exhibition is certainly rendered absurd by declaring in its sponsorship statement that surrealism challenged traditional approaches to art in the same manner that the financial group encourages its clients to challenge traditional approaches to managing their finances! 

Much art - particularly modern art - has found its way into the corporate world of banking halls, offices and boardrooms. Around Johannesburg, for example, Rothko, Miro and Kandinsky appear to be favourites. If this develops into a widened exposure or appreciation of the artist, excellent, but generally the response is either one of ignorance or ridicule. Often such artworks are not even selected on their artistic merits, but on whether they fit into the colour schemes of the building. I once managed to get a reproduction of Miro's Blue II hanging in my office. It was accepted on the grounds that my employer's predominate corporate colour was blue. Staring at the painting often sent me into some beautiful reveries (which I considered more important than the work at hand), but the response of my colleagues was one of ridicule - you know, 'my five-year-old daughter could have done that!' 

Morgan Stanley apparently owns many of the paintings on display in the exhibition, but whether this is a result of genuine art appreciation could be subject to debate. Some capitalist art collections have been created out of art appreciation, others out of appreciation of their current (and future) financial worth. And in these instances the revolutionary and subversive spirit of surrealism - surrealism as a means of liberation - is probably ignored. It is not surprising that the surrealist commitment to political revolution - and in particular the Paris group's (albeit temporary) alignment with the French Communist Party - was not referred to at the exhibition. 

Then again, capitalism had been courting surrealism almost since the beginning - the collections of Peggy Guggenheim and Edward James, for example, started back in the 1930s. Dalí became capitalism's pet and he revelled in the opportunity to make mega dollars, hence Breton's dubbing him 'Avida Dollars' (an anagram on 'Salvador Dalí'). But it wasn't just the 'charlatan' Dalí. Man Ray hobnobbed with French aristocracy and Hollywood stars and made no bones about it. The US surrealist poet Charles Henri Ford also made a point of keeping in with the rich, mixing with the likes of Cecil Beaton and Edith Sitwell. Breton himself hung around Guggenheim's salon. And there was Aragon's love affair with the wealthy Nancy Cunard… 

The surrealists were - and still are - mainly products of a bourgeois culture, so in a way it is hardly surprising that it is from this culture - against which they were/are rebelling - that they receive the most (however misunderstood) appreciation. Yet surrealism has never been an art or literary movement (or worse still, a form of escapism). To my mind it is a permanent revolution aimed at the transformation of life, its principal weapons being magic, poetry (visual, verbal or written), eroticism and revolt. Backed up with an unyielding belief in the omnipotence of liberty, dreams and desire, surrealism supports the victory of the pleasure principle over the reality principle and wages an uncompromising war against a paltry existence based on enslavement, bigotry and sham, as well as the abuse of money and power by corporate capitalism, religion, military and state. 

So when surrealism finds itself in the hands of the very establishment whose values it seeks to sweep away, it's like a joke gone wrong. 

South African poet Sinclair Beiles, commenting on contemporary surrealist poetry, wrote: 'Most surrealist poetry became mannered and its quest for unusual relationships between words, and ideas, were set down at the expense of feelings and motives [sic]. The poems became beautiful seashells devoid of life.' 

Surrealism looks into the mirror of the 21st century and sees - what? A marketing director signing off a sponsorship cheque? 

(first published online on donga in 2002)