Photography and text in Serbian Surrealism, Milanka Todić
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I’ll give you a penny to smash a plate, to say both it is and it isn’t,
it is black and it is white, both yes and no.
Nemoguće-L’impossible, 1930
“One evening in front of the ‘Ruski car’ tavern, at the beginning of the summer of 1928 [I had said, notwithstanding the absence of any indication supporting such a claim] that Nadja will be illustrated by photos, only to find out, the next morning, after the book suddenly arrived to me, that it really was illustrated by photos,” wrote Marko Ristić in the almanac Nemoguće-L’impossible published in Belgrade in 1930.1 At that particular moment the fact that it were photos and not drawings or usual graphic illustrations that were given place on the pages of a novel written by André Breton, the author of the Surrealist manifesto, held a special significance. Reflecting further on Boiffard’s photos that appeared in the first Surrealist novel, Ristić remarked that these were “ordinary but in their silent suggestivity they are staggering,” which, to his mind, constituted a self-evident confirmation that “the surreal is immanent to the real”.2
The Surrealist novel illustrated with photos was released in 1928 in Paris, and the next year (1929), Marko Ristić, along with the group of Serbian Surrealists, put himself to the work on the almanac Nemoguće-L’impossible which featured prominently the photos and photograms by Nikola Vučo and Vane Živadinović Bor. Hence, one can infer that, to some extent, it was precisely Breton’s Nadja that had directed the Serbian Surrealists’ search for new forms of communication that are established between the photo and the text. Nadja “brought about a true creative synthesis” of the artistic and the documentary novel, wrote Walter Benjamin in his essay on Surealism.3 Also, the “typo-photo” presented “a new form of book joining in one whole the image and the text”, stated Karel Teige when speaking on the subject of the modern press.4 In the 19th century the dialogue between the image and the text had taken shape of a competition, especially after the discovery of photography, followed by the discovery of film, and in the avant-garde artist groups it was particularly vigorous. The image ceases to be an accompanying element to the text and comes forth as its equal. Ut pictura poesis, as Horatio would have it.
Between the text and the image, and when it comes to the Serbian Surrealists’ publications this place is first and foremost occupied by the photography, a completely new equilibrium is established, an equilibrium in which the verbal and the visual constitute two distinct narrative currents running in parallel.5 This can plainly be observed already in a manifesto of the Serbian Surrealism published in an innovative “typo-photo” form, composed from both a text and a photogram, on the first page of the almanac Nemoguće–L’impossible, in 1930. Thus, in this collective and multimedia artwork of an avant-garde group of artists, the text of the manifesto, followed by the list of names of the thirteen Surrealists that signed it, makes its appearance on the same page as a photogram by Vane Živadinović Bor. Emphasising a revolutionary new relationship of equilibrium between the verbal and the visual, to which Breton as the ideologist of the automatic stream of thoughts attached great importance, the Serbian Surrealists claimed their almanac to be a “poetry book with pictures”. It was not only an effective pretext intended to bypass the severe censorship put in practice with the establishment of the king Aleksandar Karađorđević’s dictatorship in 1929, but also an unambiguous resolution to build up a new visual/verbal synthesis in the art of Surrealism.6
On its pages the almanac Nemoguće–L’impossible set up and consequently pursued this interdisciplinary―visual/verbal―model of artistic activity emblematic for entire large and heterogeneous group of Serbian Surrealists. Poets like Dušan Matić, Milan Dedinac, Aleksandar Vučo, Oskar Davičo, and others, write bilingually, and have their poetic narrations complemented by the visual ones. Collage, black ink drawing, photograph, are the tools of artistic expression on a par with pieces written in verse, various texts, and theoretical papers. Multifaceted dialogue between the photography and the text was in the focus of their research well before the almanac’s publication, which can be seen in Javna ptica (The Public Bird) by Milan Dedinac (1922), and the collage series by Marko Ristić created in 1926 under the title La vie mobile (The Mobile Life). This combined verbal/visual artistic practice persisted within the circle of the Serbian Surrealism, in the magazine Nadrealizam danas i ovde, but also in the period after 1932, as attested by the book such as Podvizi družine “Pet petlića” (The Valiant Deeds of the Five Little Roosters’ Club) by Aleksandar Vučo and Dušan Matić, from 1933.
Leaving aside many aspects of the Serbian Surrealists’ multimedia art activity, with almost all members of the group showing equal interest in textual and visual forms of expression, we will highlight particularly the innovative visual/verbal structures in Surrealist collages and photomontages within the context of their intercommunication.7
Abundant body of critical texts, by both domestic and foreign authors, is focused on the analysis of the Surrealist collage, but for this occasion it would be enough to call to mind Aragon’s view which has it that the Surrealist visual art is anchored in collage techniques.8 For the Surrealists, art was a delicate subject, but within the framework of their revolutionary research of the text and the image, just as the Dadaists did before them, they have invented a new role for mass-printed kitsch postcards in an opened world of creativity based on the aesthetics of ready-made.
After Marcel Duchamp’s groundbreaking intervention on a printed reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (1919), postcards came to the fore as a field of predilection for a wide variety of activities in Surrealism. The Serbian Surrealists, like their counterparts in the Parisian Surrealist hub, appropriated and introduced these cheap pictures mass-printed in vast quantities within the framework of their strategies of subversive action in the art realm. Postcards have proved a solid bridge between the image, on the averse, and the text, on the reverse side, but just as much a valuable transmitter of messages in the intense mutual communication both between thirteen Serbian Surrealists and within the highly ramified network of Surrealist artists active in the international realm. However, it was not only postcards that served the Surrealists as a means to conquer such a vast and institutionalised network which was the Post in the early decades of the 20th century. The entire system of post services was “used as a means of the movement’s internationalisation”.9 Except postcards, they exchanged, practically on the daily basis, telegrams and letters, with parcels and packages arriving periodically at their residence: those scattered around Europe, but also those situated in different areas of the same city. On almost day-to-day basis, Marko Ristić recorded his and others’ postal activities in his diary. “At April 1, 1932, Breton sent his own and Eluard’s answer to the inquiry on desire”, “I sent a number of NDIO no.2 copies to Koča, to distribute them further at addresses which Aragon gave us”, “Received a letter from Breton”, “A densely written postal card from Aca arrived” (Aleksandar Vučo), one reads in the fragmentarily published Ristić’s diary from February to April 1932.10 Later, in 1933, he spend an entire day packing the packages full of Surrealist publication to be delivered in Prague.11 “On Sundays unbutton your eyes earlier, look through the window, never doubt at night,” said the unsigned telegram delivered to Marko Ristić on July 11, 1932, in Vrnjačka Banja.12
Odmor u manastiru (A Vacation in a Monastery), Vaspitanje dece (Children Upbringing), Kolaž (Collage), are parts of a series of small size works resembling postcards and created by Vane Živadinović Bor using mass-printed reproduction in his originally executed artistic interventions and appropriations. Thereby, on the level of the avant-garde art production, Walter Benjamin’s theoretical analysis concerning the position of the artwork in the era of technical reproducibility was given a clear confirmation.13 The process of translating copies and commercial mechanical reproductions into an original artwork is markedly visible in Bor’s photo-collages and interventions done during the 1930s. The processes of appropriation of the ready-made and mechanically reproduced images, which one can find in the said Bor’s works, were crucial for the disappearance of the authentic work of art aura. What once was a singular “here and now” is turned upside down, and one finds the reproductions depicting monks in a monastery unexpectedly overlapped with an image of bathers taken at some other place and time.
The correspondence between Vane Bor and Salvador Dali, once initiated, also takes the form of appropriating the reproduction of a Dali’s illustration for the cover of the American magazine The American Weekly (01/09/1938).14 And the famed Nadar’s photo of Georges Sand Bor refurbished by adding it a dedication to Marcel Duchamp, thus forging a new chain of meanings around the gender identity of the model depicted, but also around the traditional views about the uniqueness and originality of the artwork.
The cut-and-paste procedure and the dialectical confrontation of the visual-textual fragments provided the foundation for a series of early works by Marko Ristić, primarily those from the cycle La vie mobile.15 In the context of intense correspondence, Marko Ristić, as also Vane Bor, opened a new arena for artist’s public activities using letters and postcards to spread apart the walls of his private space. Castor, a collage on a postal card, entitled thus by Ristić who sent it to Aleksandar Vučo from Paris in April 1927, opens with the following line: “In a letter I sent you a half an hour ago…” Mobility, portability, proper to a postcard, coupled with the acceleration (“a half an hour ago”), are elements of a communication comparable to the messages exchanged via the mobile phone. The postal system speeded up the communication between two friends and two fellow Surrealists, and by putting the technique of collage to practice the physical separation between “Marko” and “Aca” was disregarded and obliterated. Thus, they became like two eyeballs in the head of a curious American beaver named Castor, which is confirmed by a photo pasted onto the postcard subsequently.
Verbal/visual cut-ups in the works Quel est ce mort? (Who is This Dead Man?), Untitled, and Assamblage, created during the 1930s, depart from the traditional conception of the artwork foreshadowing the alternative experiences of mail-art and postmodern art. Private letters, envelopes with postal stamps and seals, fragments of kitsch postcards and comics, and newspapers cuttings, make up the chaotic and dynamic multimedia structure of Ristić’s collages. With these works Ristić maps the international space of Surrealist revolution and publicly reveals his intimate friendships.
Methods of appropriating, collating, and confronting thoughts, words, and images, are also typical for other members of the group of Serbian Surrealists and representatives of the avant-garde. Preserved examples point out to a highly individual and ideologico-aesthetically founded research of verbal/visual structures in the work of Monny de Boully, Boško Tokin, Dušan Matić, Oskar Davičo, Pavle Bihali, Rastko Petrović, and others.
A good example of how one can disseminate ideology and political conviction through private letters is the letter sent from Zagreb to Belgrade: from Miroslav Krleža to Marko Ristić. The Spanish Civil War was a disquieting event which Miroslav Krleža, in his letter to Marko Ristić from 1936, comments upon not only in words but also in images.16 Krleža considerably broadens the form of ordinary writing paper making it similar to a poster when it comes to its dimensions. Because of the accentuated intertextuality and ironico-propagandistic rhetorics this letter in images ought to be read as a leftist and ideologico-agitational artistic act. The letter’s envelope, which Marko Ristić, as he always did, kept together with the letter, also drops the standardised shape so as to intensify the relationship between the sender and receiver, between the conscious and unconscious, and also to move the boundaries of public postal system in favour of private communication, on the one hand, whereby, on the other, politically engaged art comes to prefigure mail-art.
Although Marko Ristić notes that he had an “unsavoury feeling after digging through old papers and letters”, and despite the fact that many letters from his abundant and longstanding correspondence are lost nowadays, there is an artist to whom we feel compelled to draw special attention in a text concerned with the Surrealist postcards and postal system in the service of Surrealism. This artist is Georges Hugnet, with whom Marko Ristić had a friendly and lasting correspondence; in 1935, specially for Ristić, he made a box with a dedication and a collage entitled Le rendez-vous (The Meeting) on its lid. Thanks to recent research, we know that in 1937 Hugnet had an idea for an ambitious international project intended to include a large number of Surrealists from all over the world, among others, of course, the Serbian Surrealists. Namely, he asked fellow artists to send him one of their unpublished works, on the condition that these would be “playing with the idea of the postcard”.17 According to extant letters, Hugnet’s project under the title La cart postale surréaliste garantie (The Guaranteed Surrealist Postcards Series) was supposed to come in a print run of 10,000 copies, and to receive financial support successively as series are released. Until the WWII he managed to put out only one series consisting of 21 postcards with works by Man Ray, Méret Oppenheim, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, et al. Even though the project as it was initially planned was not realised in its entirety, during 1947/48 Hugnet himself made a series of postcards which, as a series, only recently went on public display in New York under the heading La vie amoureuse des spumifères (The Love Life of the Spumifers).18
The project’s title stresses its being about the “guaranteed” Surrealist postcards―a loan from the modern advertising and propaganda lingo typical for the consumerist society in making that was Europe in the interwar years. During the 1930s, it was common enough in the avant-garde circles to make frequent use of the depersonalised language of advertising. Thus, on one of Tokin’s collages one reads the favourite watchword of the day: “Set yourself free from prejudices!”
Except the popular language of advertising, rejecting the injunctions of the modernity, the avant-garde adopted the mass-produced and nickel-and-dime postcards, and with them also the aesthetics of kitsch. We won’t delve deeper into the complex relations between the avant-garde and kitsch, nonetheless, on top of everything Greenberg already wrote on this matter in his famous essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch,19 we can also add the intervention by the Serbian Surrealists published in the magazine Nadrealizam danas i ovde, no. 2, in 1932.
“Love” is the title of a contribution containing two photographs accompanied by an extensive commentary. It is said that both reproductions, everything else aside, represent a “simulacrum of a fulfilled desire”. Both, with their visual message, they point to love which is “earnest enough to devastate and turn into a fairy-like vista a real summer street.” Love, “amidst true delirium made of false stones,” as is shown in another postcard, results in the “Ivresse folle” (Mad Drunkenness), which is the title of the reproduced sculpture. The Surrealist juxtaposition brings into conflict two visually different contents that are, on the level of text (legend), made equal through method of comparison. They are put on equal terms regarding their respective aesthetic value since both are the items of mass quantity and technical reproduction. That one postcard contains the reproduction of a museum piece, a sculpture, and other a kitsch take on free love, doesn’t change much in the final aesthetic meaning of the reproduction. However, since both reproductions are interpreted as simulations in the context of the Surrealist magazine Nadrealizam danas i ovde, this interpretation becomes a key point in the reading of the ideological message. Namely, the extensive commentary that goes with them, as a background voice, demands “authenticity of desire and dream,” instead of an “academic and modernist artistic painting,” thereby revealing a revolutionary attitude of an avant-garde and Surrealist group.20
One finds photography and text already in the Surrealist manifesto published on the first page of the almanac Nemoguće-L’impossible, considered as tools equally important for creating poetic images or, more precisely, for expressing the automatism of thoughts.21 In the same sense, Breton’s poetic metaphor of a man cut in two by a window also equals the values of the textual and visual for discovering and communicating subconscious contents. In the early phase of their activities, the Serbian Surrealists were also writing down their thoughts, but it wasn’t long before they discovered other, visual techniques, and ways of expression such as photography, photogram, collage, exquisite corpse, decalcomania, which were able to satisfy their revolutionary demands for stepping out of the framework of the bourgeois culture and modern art.
For free network building and establishment of the chain of exchange of ideas and meanings the Serbian Surrealists made bold recourse to official postal institution. They introduced a large international postal services system into their intimate world using small-size forms of communication such as postcards, postal cards, telegrams, in an innovative and truly unfettered way. Surely, playing and having fun constituted legitimate values in the ideology of Surrealism, and so word games employed in telegrams, along with daring interventions made on the stereotypical postcards, floated freely through public space of the postal traffic. Limited space which postcards and telegrams provide became a powerful medium for the public and revolutionary activity of the Surrealists. A reader/viewer had to establish twofold line of public communication with the postcards. One directed the eye towards reading the textual message, written on the back, and other towards deciphering the image on the front. Both visual and verbal messages modelled the intertextuality available to everyone because postcards were sometimes sent without an envelope, which led to the unrestricted dissemination of Surrealism’s ideology. However banal and a trifle matter, as mass quantity and technical reproductions, through Surrealist intervention the postcards were translated into original avant-garde works characterised by complex textuality. They helped bring about adjusting of the postal system to the Surrealists’ private needs interrogating the traditional forms of communication between sender and receiver, between the public and the private, and also between kitsch and avant-garde.
Notes:
1. “Čeljust dijalektike”, Nemoguće-L’impossible, Beograd, 1930, 45; B. J. Komins, “Sightseeing in Paris with Baudelaire and Breton”, Comparative Literature and Culture, 2001, 2.1, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss1/.
2. Ibid.
3. W. Benjamin, “Nadrealizam, poslednji trenutni snimak evropske inteligencije”, Eseji, Beograd, 1974, 262.
4. K. Tajge, “Konstruktivistička tipografija na putu ka novoj formi knjige”, Vašar umetnosti, Beograd, 1977, 188.
5. M. Todić, Nemoguće, umetnost nadrealizma, Beograd, 2002, 29-31.
6. Ibid., 27-31, 69.
7. M. Todić, “Cut and Paste Pictures in Surrealism”, Muzikologija, 6, 2006, 281-302, http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/1450-9814/2006/1450-98140606281T.pdf.
8. L. Aragon, La Peinture au défi, Paris 1930.
9. E. B. Heuer, Going Postal: Surrealism and the Discourses of Mail Art, http://etd.lib.fsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11102008-141907/unrestricted/HeuerEDisseration.pdf.
10. M. Ristić, Oko nadrealizma II (prir. N. Bertolino), Beograd, 2007, 115, 121.
11. Ibid., 495.
12. Ibid., 351.
13. W. Benjamin, O fotografiji i umetnosti, Beograd, 2007.
14. Vane Bor, “Correspondance à Salvador Dali, Beograd, 31 décembre 1932”, Le surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 6, Paris, 1933, 46; M. Todić, Nemoguće, 52, 71.
15. M. Todić, “Cut and Paste Pictures in Surrealism”, 282-287.
16. For the postcards issued in relation to the then ongoing Spanish Civil War see at more length in E. B. Heuer, op. cit.
17. E. B. Heuer, op. cit.
18. http://ubugallery.com/phpwcms/download.php?id=167581,3216,1; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/arts/design/georges-hugnets-spumifers-at-ubu-gallery-review.html
19. C. Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html.
20. Nadrealizam danas i ovde, 2, Beograd, 1932, s.p.
21. K. Grant, Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and Reception, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, 22
trans. into eng.: Đorđe Čolić
