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Invisible Surrealists

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Images #

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Installation view of Invisible Surrealists at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2014
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Installation view of Invisible Surrealists at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2014
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Installation view of Invisible Surrealists at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2014
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

http://samdurant.net/files/gimgs/th-7_04.jpg
Installation view of Invisible Surrealists at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2014
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Installation view of Invisible Surrealists at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2014
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

http://samdurant.net/files/gimgs/th-7_06.jpg
Installation view of Invisible Surrealists at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2014
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Invisible Surrealists, 2014
Graphite on paper
34.625″ × 24.75″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Transform the World, 2014
Graphite on paper
54″ × 39.5″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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1916, Shell Shock, Psych Ward, André Breton Becomes Aware of the Unconscious, 2014
Graphite and enamel on paper
22″ × 30″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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1918, The Art of War (French troops passing General Foch on their way to the front, Trenches on the French Front), 2014
Graphite on paper
Overall dimensions: 45.25″ × 72.5″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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1918, War is Over (Armistice day, Place de la Concorde, Paris), 2014
Graphite on paper
38 5/8″ × 54 3/8″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Early 20th Cent., Now That its Impossible to See Clearly, Let us Try to Shed Some Light on the Darkness (Sigmund Freud), 2014
Colored pencil and graphite on paper
Overall dimensions: 26.69″ × 145.75″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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An Ingression of the Superstructure Into the Base, 2014
Found objects, light bulbs, plaster, wood, marble, steel, wood, MDF, acrylic, gauche
Overall dimensions: 65.5″ × 56.5″ × 57″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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An Ingression of the Superstructure Into the Base (detail), 2014
Found objects, light bulbs, plaster, wood, marble, steel, wood, MDF, acrylic, gauche
Overall dimensions: 65.5″ × 56.5″ × 57″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

http://samdurant.net/files/gimgs/th-7_16_v2.jpg
An Ingression of the Superstructure Into the Base (detail), 2014
Found objects, light bulbs, plaster, wood, marble, steel, wood, MDF, acrylic, gauche
Overall dimensions: 65.5″ × 56.5″ × 57″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

http://samdurant.net/files/gimgs/th-7_17_v2.jpg
An Ingression of the Superstructure Into the Base (detail), 2014
Found objects, light bulbs, plaster, wood, marble, steel, wood, MDF, acrylic, gauche
Overall dimensions: 65.5″ × 56.5″ × 57″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

http://samdurant.net/files/gimgs/th-7_18_v2.jpg
An Ingression of the Superstructure Into the Base (detail), 2014
Found objects, light bulbs, plaster, wood, marble, steel, wood, MDF, acrylic, gauche
Overall dimensions: 65.5″ × 56.5″ × 57″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

http://samdurant.net/files/gimgs/th-7_19_v2.jpg
An Ingression of the Superstructure Into the Base (detail), 2014
Found objects, light bulbs, plaster, wood, marble, steel, wood, MDF, acrylic, gauche
Overall dimensions: 65.5″ × 56.5″ × 57″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Les Armes Miraculeuses, 2014
Marble, wood, eggs, shells
Overall dimensions: 34″ × 18.5″ × 24″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Les Armes Miraculeuses (detail), 2014
Marble, wood, eggs, shells
Overall dimensions: 34″ × 18.5″ × 24″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Mouth on Paper (Jayne Cortez), 2014
Graphite and acrylic on paper
30″ × 21.5″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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1938, Mexico (André Breton, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and Jaqueline Breton), 2014
Colored pencil on paper
17.19″ × 23.13″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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There’s No Such Thing as a Time Line, 2014
Archival digital printing, collage, graphite, color pencil and ink on paper, African Mahogany
170″ × 35″ × 1.75″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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There’s No Such Thing as a Time Line (detail), 2014
Archival digital printing, collage, graphite, color pencil and ink on paper, African Mahogany
170″ × 35″ × 1.75″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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1938, Freud’s House, Vienna, 2014
Graphite on paper
16.875″ × 24.562″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Non-Vicious Circle, 2014
Powder coated steel, wood, artillery shell casings, stainless steel cable
55″ × 49.63″ × 41.25″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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1959, 1938, Descending Ascending Stairs, 2014
Graphite on paper
43.125″ × 25″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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1959, 1966, To the Marquis de Sade, 2014
Graphite and enamel on paper
44″ × 32.25″;
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Sun Filled Fountain (Leopold Senghor, Amilcar Cabral), 2014
Graphite on paper
26″ × 40″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

![http://samdurant.net/files/gimgs/th-7_31_v2.jpg](img_old/7_31_v2.jpg " Enemy of all that is not Marvelous (Suzanne Césaire), 2014
Graphite and enamel on paper
28.75" × 22.125″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert. “)

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Men’s Vices Are My Domain (Joyce Mansour), 2014
Graphite and enamel on pape
21.625″ × 21.75″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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1946, Santo Domingo, La Poesia Sorprendida de André Breton, 2014
Graphite and acrylic on paper
25.75″ × 36.25″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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The Séance, When History Wakes Up (Frantz Fanon), 2014
Graphite on and enamel on paper
30″ × 22″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Poetry Must Be Made By All, Not By One, 2014
Graphite on paper
26″ × 40″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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’…the great game of hide and seek has succeeded, it is them because, on that day, the weather is most certainly too blindingly bright and beautiful to see clearly therein’, 2014
Globe, acrylic
32″ dia.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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1937, Artists and Models, ‘Eros and Thantos are Lovers as well as Adversaries’, 2014
Colored Pencil on paper
20.125″ × 30″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Another Surrealist Map of the World, 2014
Colored Pencil and ink on paper
55.187″ × 51.25″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Another Future Was Possible (kiosk from Mai 68), 2014
Aluminum, ink on paper
77.25″ × 39.5“ × 39.5″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

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Another Future Was Possible (kiosk from Mai 68) (detail), 2014
Aluminum, ink on paper
77.25″ × 39.5“ × 39.5″
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert


Text #

Invisible Surrealists is a reimagined history of surrealism. It takes the form of an exhibition that brings writers and artists from the Francophone colonial world into the well-known Parisian narrative. It is a decolonizing project. Surrealism is arguably the most popularly known art movement of the 20th century. In American culture it has become a cliché, overflowing with facile imitations of Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy, from undergraduate painting classrooms to thrift shops. While academic art history has made the movement canonical, it has framed it in a narrow way, with some notable exceptions. The Eurocentric history has largely excluded the multitudes of writers and artists from the “third world”, the “global south”, from the francophone former colonial world. The established narrative has detached surrealism of much of its radical potential, its capacities for re-imagining social relations, sexual and gender liberation and its commitment to revolutionary political struggles, anti-nationalism and de-colonization.

The central focus of Invisible Surrealists is to re-integrate lesser-known surrealists from the Francophone colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia with the Paris based founders of the movement. Several drawings depict iconic group images of the well-known figures around Andre Breton into which I have added a number of “third world” surrealists. The non-white surrealists who figuratively “join the club” in these works include Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Jules Monnerot, Rene Menil, Wilfredo Lam and Joyce Mansour among others.

Several works deal with the relationship between war (the European wars, imperialist violence and anti-colonial struggle) and art, between Eros and Thanatos, exemplified by the parallel phenomena of shell shock and the avant-garde “shock of the new”. The First World War also gave rise to the phenomena of “Trench Art”. Soldiers stuck in battlefield trenches for weeks and months on end in hellish conditions began to repurpose the war material around them into things like ashtrays, vases, toys, lighters. Trench art can be understood as a form of sublimation, the soldiers channeling their unconscious aggressive energy toward socially acceptable production. In this way art itself might be understood as a threat to the state of war.

Surrealism opened the door for desire, sexuality and transgression to operate more freely, out in the open, as an alternative to repressive status quo “reality”. Philosopher Herbert Marcuse saw in surrealism the possibility for individual transformation. He theorized that only transformed individuals could make a revolution of more liberatory forms of social relations, and not simply the replacement of one oppressive system by another.

In 1914 the First World War brought home to Europe the reality that civilization and barbarism are two sides of the same coin. The people living under European colonial rule, however, had been well aware of this duality, having lived with the effects, both physical and mental, of its brutality for centuries. Martiniquean surrealist Aimé Césaire wrote simply “Europe is indefensible”. his Discourse on Colonialism, a forceful exposition on the violence of European imperialism. The Parisian surrealists were of course linked with the communist party, largely through Picasso. What is perhaps lesser known is their early break with the CP and their solidarity with anti-colonial struggles around the world. Some of my sculptures and drawings show reprints of several of the anti-colonial tracts that surrealists published against imperialist aggression from Vietnam to the Soviet crushing of Hungarian democracy to Cuba. Many of these texts were composed by the surrealists from the margins and joined by those in Paris.

My project seeks to show that the surrealist ideals of personal, political and social emancipation and transformation should include both the center and the margin in a complex, hybrid arena defined by hues and shades rather than black and white.