Dr Sanja Bahun (Lecturer, Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies
University Essex)
The Dialectics of the Impossible, One Minute before Murder: Yugoslav Surrealism 1924-1933
My paper will address the activities of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle, one of the most vibrant Surrealist strongholds in Europe whose activities were roughly coterminous with the early activities of the Parisian Centrale. Active from 1924 to 1933 (or, in public pronouncements, from 1922 to 1932), this surrealist branch produced numerous collective and individual literary and art-works (more than twenty books of poetry and prose, paintings, Le Cadavre Exquis, collages, assemblages, photograms and photographs, multimedia artefacts), as well as the surrealist hybrid forms such as manifestoes, surveys, and theoretical works, published in book-form or in fanzines, magazines, bilingual journals and almanacs; many of these artefacts were produced in close collaboration with the French Surrealists. Perceiving their role as that of a global avant-garde conduit, and in the spirit of non-partisan eclecticism characteristic of a ‘minor nation’s’ aesthetic activity, the Belgrade Surrealists fused the avant-garde experiences of Western and Eastern Europe: they freely cross-pollinated the French Surrealist and the Russian Futurist aesthetics. Part of my presentation at the symposium ‘Across the Frontiers: International Surrealism’ will concern the mapping of this important Surrealist outpost and the implications of the avant-garde spread in what Franz Kafka termed a ‘small nation’s culture’. In addition to surveying the Yugoslav surrealists’ artistic and literary contributions, on this occasion I will specifically attend to two underdiscussed artefacts produced by the Belgrade Surrealist Group: the bilingual almanac L’Impossible/Nemogu?e and the 122-page long philosophical tract Outline for a Phenomenology of the Irrational (Rastko Popovi? and Marko Risti?, 1931). These will serve to specify the diverse artistic and conceptual frameworks of the Belgrade Surrealist Group as well as their contribution to the discourses within the global Surrealist collective.
The fact that the Belgrade Circle not only followed, but also frequently adumbrated the French Surrealists’ activities powerfully complicates the picture of geocultural interrelating. Not surprisingly, the intense collaboration between the Belgrade and Paris Surrealist groups testified to both accord and misunderstanding: the problems of rapport invariably concerned the divergence between geopolitical and cultural contexts of the two groups. Like many avant-gardes in the ‘peripheral’ cultural settings, the Belgrade Surrealists felt that their artistic ‘corrective’ to society was more authentic than that of the purportedly emanating ‘centre’; theirs was a particularly complex political case. Elsewhere I have claimed that the most adequate tool for examining and describing intercultural dynamics such as those established between the Parisian and Belgrade Surrealist collectives, is provided by a theory of the oblique (Bahun-Radunovi? 2006). The concept of the oblique, whose added value resides in its intimate link with Surrealist aesthetics, not only articulates the inevitability of the diverse cultural refractions of a cultural product or a mode of aesthetic activity, but also, if understood in its complexity, curtails the unidirectional propositions of cultural transmission. I have proposed that the use of this conceptualisation of visuality in the studies of international surrealism may prevent binary geometrical-cultural simplifications (such as that of the contrast between an emanating centre and an absorbing margin), while simultaneously preserving the specificities of the historical and material content, so frequently lost in the relativization of the notions of the centre and the margin. In this paper I aim to present and further develop this methodological framework; I will complement my analysis of the Belgrade-Paris zone of contact with an examination of the role of the Belgrade Group in regional context (Yugoslav, Greek and Romanian surrealist collectives).
The fact that the Belgrade Circle not only followed, but also frequently adumbrated the French Surrealists’ activities powerfully complicates the picture of geocultural interrelating. Not surprisingly, the intense collaboration between the Belgrade and Paris Surrealist groups testified to both accord and misunderstanding: the problems of rapport invariably concerned the divergence between geopolitical and cultural contexts of the two groups. Like many avant-gardes in the ‘peripheral’ cultural settings, the Belgrade Surrealists felt that their artistic ‘corrective’ to society was more authentic than that of the purportedly emanating ‘centre’; theirs was a particularly complex political case. Elsewhere I have claimed that the most adequate tool for examining and describing intercultural dynamics such as those established between the Parisian and Belgrade Surrealist collectives, is provided by a theory of the oblique (Bahun-Radunovi? 2006). The concept of the oblique, whose added value resides in its intimate link with Surrealist aesthetics, not only articulates the inevitability of the diverse cultural refractions of a cultural product or a mode of aesthetic activity, but also, if understood in its complexity, curtails the unidirectional propositions of cultural transmission. I have proposed that the use of this conceptualisation of visuality in the studies of international surrealism may prevent binary geometrical-cultural simplifications (such as that of the contrast between an emanating centre and an absorbing margin), while simultaneously preserving the specificities of the historical and material content, so frequently lost in the relativization of the notions of the centre and the margin. In this paper I aim to present and further develop this methodological framework; I will complement my analysis of the Belgrade-Paris zone of contact with an examination of the role of the Belgrade Group in regional context (Yugoslav, Greek and Romanian surrealist collectives).
