The Final Word, June 2008

from the SF Northside, 2008

To my surprise, André Breton, often called "the father of surrealism," was in the news last month. In London, Sotheby's auctioned the only existing copy of Breton's The Surrealist Manifesto, which he wrote in 1924. He died at age 70 in 1966. The document was Breton's argument for "uncontrolled art." At auction, it was expected to fetch at least a half-million dollars. I did not catch all the details of the story as I listened to NPR at 5 a.m. because the garbage men arrived at that moment just outside my window and made too much noise for me to hear very well. Perhaps Breton might have called this a "Dadaist accident." I have to give Sharon Anderson credit for that expression. At any rate, it was an uncontrolled moment.
The manifesto gave rise to the notion of "automatic writing," and I envy anyone who can do it. I never found anything automatic about writing. Breton explained it this way: "psychic automatism in its pure state."
He and the other surrealists had a great sense of humor, that's what's charming about them. Breton might have been amused by the garbage men making a racket because so many people characterized the work of the surrealists as rubbish. Odd that, even if Breton's pal, Marcel Duchamp, displayed an ordinary urinal, and titled it Fountain. I saw it the other day in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Then again, I might have just been in the men's room. It's wonderful to think of the outrage this stuff caused. They literally incited riots back in those halcyon days of tender sensibilities.
Certainly Breton, who came from a poor family, would also be amused by the staggering amount of money that his work garners today. Surrealism was a result of the horrors of the First World War. These artists figured that nothing could be more absurd than that inexplicable piece of terror that the military and the government cooked up. So the Dadists and the Surrealists responded with a brutal brand of satire. Why bother explaining this sort of art when everything else is beyond explanation? But Breton does explain it, well kind of, in this 21-page document called The Surrealist Manifesto. The details of his his writing, his definition of "psychic automatism," is wondrous. Breton was a great poet. He provided a hotline to the irreal, a direct connection to the subconscious. The notion of an auction carried out by the art establishment would have made him laugh. I hope it would. He would not laugh, though, at the continuing madness of wars around the world. Artists cannot stop war, it seems. But maybe they can get people to start talking about war. I wish we would talk about Iraq more often, it appears that it fell off the media radar. It's a pretty good example of madness and inexplicable horror.
I hope someone savvy and with a good trouble-making spirit buys The Surrealist Manifesto. Perhaps an American, who might take it to Washington D.C. and reads the whole thing into the Congressional Record.
I wonder if anyone would notice.

Bruce Bellingham is a columnist for the Marina Times and writes Bellingham by the Bay for this newspaper. He agrees with the late poet Allen Ginsberg, who suggested that someone should throw potato salad at professors who lecture us about Dadaism.

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