Art History Research Lecture: Prof Susan Laxton 'Surrealist Photomontage c. 1931: Politics and Desire'

Join us for Professor Susan Laxton's Research Seminar on ‘Surrealist Photomontage c. 1931: Politics and Desire' at 4pm on the 21 February in School 2 and also the wine reception afterwards at 79 North Street.

Historically, pictorial evidence of Surrealism's engagement with practical politics has been scarce to nonexistent, supporting the ultimate incompatibility of their aesthetic priorities with soviet ideals. But recently, evidence to the contrary has surfaced in the form of a suite of more than 33 photomontages made by André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Suzanne Muzard in the years 1931- 1933, at a moment of the Surrealist movement's intense involvement with the French Communist Party. Hidden from view for decades in a modest notebook among Breton's belongings, they advance an image of Surrealism at once familiar and unprecedented–an instance of struggle to reconcile psychoanalysis with pragmatic leftist action, offered in the form of visual amalgams constructed out of the pages of the illustrated press. Collaborative, topical, and fiercely critical, these photomontages body forth, in addition to the expected incompossibilities of surrealist juxtaposition, structures that call to mind Walter Benjamin's “dialectical image,” presenting, through their technique and iconography, representations of Marxian-inflected space wherein unconscious processes would inevitably come to expression: politics cut together with desire.

Bio: Susan Laxton is Associate Professor of Modernism and the History of Photography at University of California, Riverside. Her book, Surrealism at Play (Duke University Press, 2019) offers the first critical assessment of the critical ludic strategies operating in the movement. Laxton's work has been supported by The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Hellman, Gould and Borchard Foundations. It can be found in Critical Inquiry, October and History of Photography, as well as in a number of catalogs and edited volumes that treat her main interests: photography, play, and the alternative art practices of the 20th century avant-gardes. She is currently at work on a second book manuscript tentatively entitled Cut Together: Surrealism, Photomontage and Politics.