Category Archives: Surrealism & Revolution

In our first blog posts, we were asked to respond to the question “Can art be subversive? Can it have real political impact?” For me, the answer was always yes. But reading Yates McKee’s “Occupy and the End of Socially Engaged Art,” John Berger’s “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations,” and watching the documentary Ai Weiwei:Continue reading “Rehearsing Revolution”

“Our synaptic network is momentarily disrupted when we are truly surprised, as our brain scrambles to figure out what is going on. This is not a sinister experience; it is a moment of openness and freshness, in which new perspectives, responses, and reflections are possible” (Bogad 37).

“I’m your audience, and you’re mine” (Bernstein 96). In All the King’s Horses, Michele Bernstein portrays an open marriage between Genevieve and Gilles. They meet a young woman, Carole, whom they are both attracted to, and Gilles enters into a relationship with her. The balance of power shifts when Gilles falls in love with Carole.Continue reading “Mapping the Lovers’ Derive”

In my research on Fluxus, I found that the movement had two main goals: (1) to challenge elite art institutions and to (2) meld art and life so that they are inseparable. In order to blur these boundaries, they experimented with form through “intermedia” – creating genres of art that crossed traditional categories, like visualContinue reading “Invitations and Infiltrations”

“The interest is not in consciousness and its freedom, but in the production of new situations as an end in themselves” (Wark 58). In The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark introduces the many players in the Situationist movement through a historical derive. This form allows the reader to experience the feeling of being withinContinue reading “The Materials of the Situation”

“Towards the end of his life, Aimé Césaire has declared that the question he and his friend Léopold Sédar Senghor came to raise after they first met was: ‘Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world?’ And he commented: ‘That’s quite a problem” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Shifting from Breton’sContinue reading “Who Am I? Who Are We? What Are We?”

In the short film L’Etoile de Mer, Man Ray portrays the story of a love affair. Using gel to cover the lens of the camera, most of the scenes of the lovers together and of the woman by herself are seen through a gauzy film, as if we are underwater. The human story is familiarContinue reading “Flower of Glass, Flesh, Fire”

“When we remember the experience of reading a book, we imagine a continuous unfolding of images.” (What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund)