“André Breton,” a household name? Yes, if the household is a carnival funhouse, or you have cool parents. His brainchild, “Surrealism,” as an art movement, has given us some of the most durable works in all genres. Consider Dali’s melting clocks, and Luis Buñuel's, Un Chien Andalou (1928), famous for its eye-slicing scene. René Magritte’s painting says “this is not a pipe” when that’s exactly what the image is, therefore the painting’s title: “The Treachery of Images.”
Surrealism’s tricks and methods have become so prosaic and ubiquitous, the most unhinged formations of “pure psychic automatism” now appear everywhere: Miss Piggy rappelling down Mount Rushmore, but the presidents' faces are replaced with actors from a new film, and it’s crossover media campaign for a new movie, straight to an exclusive streaming platform? That’s cool.
But the undiluted message of Surrealism, as André Breton (sometimes violently) pronounced and defended, meant to disorient the status quo in each of our heads, combining Rimbaud and Marx to conjure a new aesthetic politics.
When I think of Breton, I think of the first poem by Breton I read. I’m not sure if it is a love poem, but it is certainly written by someone in love. And I’d never read anything like it. Here is the beginning:
My wife whose hair is a brush fire
Whose thoughts are summer lightning
Whose waist is an hourglass
Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger
Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude
Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow
Of this poem, Allen Ginsberg wrote “And so it’s a portrait of his wife, sort of Cubist (in the sense of, from a lot of different angles) but, at the same time, absolutely ridiculous, and even ugly at times, and then, at other times, very romantic and exquisite.” In our age of sext messages, Breton may show us how to keep it interesting (I can’t attest to the outcomes of this type of erotic rhetoric, I imagine the subject would be a bit … confused). Perhaps he is detailing a blueprint for our times, a balm or solution to the disorientation suffered at the hands of state apparatus, where the solution takes place in our own unconscious, and in the aesthetic derangement of the system otherwise.
-Ben Fama