by Gus Mitchell
The following piece is my own minor contribution to the “Surrealism Centenary.” I begin with a disavowal of the entire “2024 centenary” enterprise, which seems to have added little to our appreciation of the group, and because I would question allowing Andre Breton, great though he sometimes was, to continue to define the wildly heterodox big bang to which he claimed total definition in October 1924.
Let us begin to celebrate the spirit of the surreal again. True to that spirit, let us slough off the burden of officialism and of art history. Let us not be bound to Breton or (heaven help us) Dali any longer.
This year should begin an overhaul of correction to the Anglophone ignorance of the movement’s noblest, most enduring, and still-dangerous representatives, who always were the outcasts, misfits, and weirdos among those proudly self-proclaimed outcasts, misfits, and weirdos.
Of these, a host of obscurer names and out of print-translations can be dug into online.
What I outline here is merely my favourite example.
In the 1910s, a quartet of teenaged artistic comrades in provincial France––Rene Daumal, Robert Gilbert-Lecompte, novelist Roger Vailland and Robert Meyrat––began a drug-fuelled quest into what they termed “experimental metaphysics”. After forming something of an adolescent secret society/artistic movement (which they dubbed Simplisme) this core quartet moved to Paris, made some older acquaintances and formed a short-lived journal: Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game) of which only three issues appeared, between 1928 and 1932. (The essence of this work and an essential English handbook to the group can be found in the English translation Theory of the Great Game, edited by Dennis Duncan, pictured above.) Read more »