The Centre's Contribution to Surrealist Studies
Inclusive in its ethos, the Centre serves to draw together a number of currently separate strands of scholarship. The sheer range and diversity of surrealist visual and literary production exceeds the competencies of any one academic specialism. The Centre encourages the direct involvement of literary and film specialists in its projects and publications, as well as an increase in dialogue between historians, on the one hand, and philosophers and cultural theorists engaged in the contemporary theoretical appropriation of surrealism, on the other.
Tate’s involvement in the Centre partnership affords valuable opportunities for interaction and exchange between academics and museum professionals, and permits the most up-to-date scholarship to inform the presentation of visual culture to a wide public. This, and other areas of the Centre's programme, has fostered a genuine dialogue between practice and art history. Our two artist residencies notably created the conditions for a fruitful encounter between an artistic sensibility and historical approaches that has the potential to yield new insights into surrealism.
By seeking to grasp what is distinctive about surrealism and simultaneously exploring its diverse legacies, the Centre is making a timely contribution to debates about inter-disciplinarity, what it is and how it can be accomplished. Its exhilarating sense of openness to whatever chanced to come its way meant that surrealism inevitably found itself at the crossroads of the vital cultural and aesthetic currents of its day. In a generous spirit, Michel Foucault spoke of Breton as one of the true pioneers of a project of radical questioning that continues to the present day:
'There is no doubt that the whole network connecting the works of Breton, Georges Bataille, Leiris, and Blanchot, and extending through the domains of ethnology, art history, the history of religions, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, are effacing the rubrics in which our culture classified itself, and revealing unforeseen kinships, proximities, and relations. It is very probable that we owe this new scattering and this new unity in our culture to the person and the work of André Breton. He was both the spreader and gatherer of all this agitation in modern experience.'
The rich density of the terrain marked out by Foucault defines the scope of our research programme. By exposing these 'unforeseen kinships, proximities, and relations', the study of surrealism is unearthing the roots of our theoretical present, and unlocking from the past new and productive research potentials.