Trotsky, Rivera, Bretón (México, 1938)

Trotsky, Rivera, Bretón.  México, 1938.

En 1938, André Breton estuvo cuatro meses en México.

Trotsky, Breton and Rivera reclaim the revolutionary potential of art.

Excerpts from André Breton in Mexico: Surrealist Visions of an “Independent Revolutionary” Landscape by Nathaniel Hooper Zingg, BA:

In his first 1924 manifesto, Breton defines “surrealism” as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express [...] the actual functioning of thought” (26). The “automatic writer” is a mere “recording vessel” logging whatever might emerge (by chance) from an unimpeded flow of (unconscious) images (27-8). But even in the first manifesto, not everything that results from this mere “recording” exercise is equally potent: the most “surreal” moments are disruptive, jarring juxtapositions of two very different images. A surrealist “metaphor” is an uncanny clash, a logically irreconcilable combination of seemingly random ephemera.

Metaphor’s process of conjoining “distant realities” constitutes a type of “alchemy” for Breton (see Balakian 34). As Anna Balakian has noted, surrealist metaphor is not about finding “correspondences” between this “world” and a more perfect one of forms as in the philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg and the symbolist writings of Charles Baudelaire (35). Rather, the coming-together of objects from “logically unrelated” spheres is more akin to a generative process of metamorphosis; these fragments of reality, in their surrealist juxtaposition, “become something else:” an alchemical reaction (Balakian 36).