Research Themes
The research programme of the Centre since it was established has been organised around several themes or questions, outlined below, to which has been added a new project on surrealism and non-normative sexualities. Academic research on surrealism has been traditionally the province of several humanistic disciplines: art history, literary studies, film studies, cultural anthropology and philosophy. The Centre has orchestrated its activities and events in such a way as to maximise the opportunities for interaction between disciplines and across lines of professional demarcation.
i. Contemporary artistic legacies. Postmodernism and critical theory have been a spur to the wholesale re-evaluation of surrealism whose adversarial relation to the modernism of its day would seem to be one of the determinants of its current popularity and resonance. The resurgence within contemporary art of such themes as strolling, hysteria, the erotic and sexuality, the everyday as a topic of current theoretical as well as artistic reflection, the renewed use of automatist and collage techniques - these trends testify to surrealism's enduring appeal and its continued relevance. Surrealism is also recognised as a key influence on experimental film and animation. The Centre's involvement of living artists in its activities has been one means of exploring the continued, multivalent impact of surrealism within recent visual culture. It has also been the objective of exhibitions organised by the Centre to map areas of propinquity between historical surrealism and contemporary art.
ii. Surrealism's intellectual heritage. To study surrealism is to unearth the roots of our intellectual present. While surrealism is recognised as having been of importance for Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, and for the intellectuals and activists associated with Tel Quel and Situationism, there are many other facets of its intellectual heritage that remain to be more fully elucidated. The dissident surrealist Georges Bataille is increasingly recognised as a forerunner of post-structuralism. Michel Foucault, in a generous spirit, credited Breton and surrealism with instigating a radical questioning of the demarcations of knowledge, which continues into the present under the banner of inter-disciplinarity. Part of the uniqueness of surrealism owed to the open dialogue it maintained with diverse cultural, scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses, including psychology, psychoanalysis, ethnography, physics and natural history, as a result of which it found itself at the cross-roads of all the vital intellectual currents of the day. The Centre is investigating the interaction of surrealism with science (including psychoanalysis) as a dominant system of knowledge, and the procedures of interrogation, parody, appropriation and deconstruction that characterise it.
iii. Surrealism beyond Europe. The Centre is liaising with scholars working in places such as Australia, Japan, and Latin America, where surrealism took hold, on issues of cultural diffusion and assimilation in a global context. Surrealism was determinedly trans-national as a movement, and, while seeking to control and orchestrate its manifestations worldwide, sought affiliations with like-minded groups and also with non-Western systems of thought. Marginalised in current literature is the significance of surrealism for the study of Pre-Columbian and Native American culture. We also aim to investigate the important, but largely occulted, role of surrealism in the emergence of anti-colonial discourse in the Americas and Europe, via such figures as Aimé Cesaire and the review Tropiques. The study of surrealist reception beyond Europe has begun to question the usual hierarchy of centre and periphery and the perception that as surrealism moved away from France it became watered down and lost its subversive impulse. Instead, one finds that its emancipatory message has been harnessed to new, unforeseen political and cultural agendas as it is diffused worldwide, a process that still continues in some places.
iv. Surrealism and sexuality. At the core of Surrealism was a claim to emancipate human desire. While the broad topic of eroticism has received lavish attention, scholars of Surrealism have tended to shy away from addressing the more fraught issue of non-normative sexuality. The neglect is regrettable, because Surrealism, despite Breton's intolerance, did attract a formidable array of queer artists and writers, photographers, and filmmakers. These `other' Surrealists were crucial to Surrealism's reception in England, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Australia, and elsewhere. Long after its heyday in France was over, they kept Surrealism alive, laying the groundwork for creative negotiations of the body, gender, and sexuality by more recent generations of artists. The Centre has been awarded a major AHRC grant for a three-year project that seeks to redress the inattention and fragmentation of this important subject.