The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism Author(S): Rosalind Krauss Source: October, Vol

Home , Florence Henri, Maurice Tabard, Minotaure

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism Author(s): Rosalind Krauss Source: October, Vol. 19 (Winter, 1981), pp. 3-34 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778652 . Accessed: 08/09/2013 11:08

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ROSALIND KRAUSS

I open my subject with a comparison. On the one hand, thereis Man Ray's Monument to de Sade, a photograph made in 1933 for the magazine Le Surreal- isme au servicede la rekvolution.On the other,there is a self-portraitby Florence Henri, given wide exposure by its appearance in the 1929 Foto-Auge,a publication thatcatalogued theEuropean avant-garde'sposition withregard to photography.' This comparison involves, then, a slight adulteration of my subject- surrealism-by introducingan image deeply associated with the Bauhaus. For FlorenceHenri had been a studentof Moholy-Nagy,although at the timeof Foto- Auge she had returnedto Paris. Of course thepurity of Foto-Auge'sstatement had already been adulteratedby the presence within its covers of certain surrealist associates,like Man Ray, Maurice Tabard, and E. T. L. Mesens. But by and large Foto-Auge is dominated by German materialand can be conceivedof as organiz- ing a Bauhaus view of photography,a view thatwe now thinkof as structuredby the Vorkors'sobsession with form. Indeed, one way of eavesdroppingon a Bauhaus-derivedexperience of this photograph is to read its analysis from the introductionto a recent reprint portfolio of Henri's work. Remarking that she is known almost exclusively throughthis self-portrait,the writercontinues, Its concentrationand structureare so perfectthat its quintessenceis at once apparent.The forcefulimpression it produces derivesprincipally fromthe subject's intense gaze at herown reflection.... Her gaze passes

* Originallypresented as a colloquium paper at theCenter for Advanced Study in theVisual Arts, Washington,D.C., February12, 1981,this essay is theresult of researchsupported by a fellowshipfrom the center.I am gratefulfor the atmosphereof support and exchange provided by this remarkable institutionand its director,Henry A. Millon. Based upon the preliminaryreturns of this research, an exhibitionof surrealistphotography is being planned for 1983 as a collaboration betweenmyself and Jane Livingston, Associate Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington,D.C. Two scholarly resources were particularly useful for this subject: Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978; and Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism,Akron, Ohio, The Akron ArtsInstitute, 1979. 1. Franz Roh, Foto-Auge,Stuttgart, 1929; reprintTiibingen, Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1973.

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dispassionatelythrough the mirrorand is returned-parallel to the lines made by thejoints in the table. . . . The balls-normally symbols of movement-here strengthenthe impressionof stillnessand undis- turbedcontemplation .... They have been assigned a position at the vertexof the picture... their exact position at the same time lends stabilityto the structureand provides the dominant element of the human reflectionwith the necessarycontrast.2 In lightof thewriter's determination to straightjacketthis image within the limits of an abstracting,mechanically formalist discourse, the strategybehind a

2. Florence Henri Portfolio, Cologne, Galerie Wilde, 1974, introduction by Klaus-Jiirgen Senbach.

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Man. Ray. Monumentto de Sade. 1933.Published in Le Surrealismeau servicede la revolution,May 1933. juxtapositionof Man Ray's photographwith FlorenceHenri's becomesapparent. Because the comparison forcesattention away fromthe contentsof the Henri- whetherthose contentsare conceivedof as psychological(the "intensegaze" and its dispassionate stare) or as formal (the establishmentof stillness through structuralstability, etc.). And being turnedfrom the photograph's contents, one's attentionis relocatedon the container-on what could be called the characterof the frameas sign or emblem. For the Henri and the Man Ray share the same recourseto the definitionof a photographicsubject through the act of framingit, even as theyshare the same enframingshape. In both cases one is treatedto the captureof thephotographic subject by the frame,and in both, this capturehas a sexual import.In the Man Ray the act of rotation,which transmutesthe sign of the cross into the figureof the phallus, juxtaposes an emblem of the Sadean act of sacrilegewith an image of the object

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of its sexual pleasure. And two furtheraspects of thisimage bespeak thestructural reciprocitybetween frame and image, containerand contained. The lightingof the buttocksand thighsof the subject is such thatphysical densitydrains offthe body as it moves from the centerof the image, so that by the time one's gaze approaches the margins, fleshhas become so generalizedand flattenedas to be assimilatedto printedpage. Given thisthreat of dissipation of physicalsubstance, the frameis experiencedas shoring up the collapsing structureof corporeality and guaranteeingits densityby the ratherconceptual gestureof drawing limits. This sense of the structuralintervention of frame inside contents is further deepened by the morphological consonance-what we could call the visual rhyming-betweenshape of frameand shape of figure:for the linear intersections set up by the cleftsand folds in the photographed anatomy mimic the master shape of the frame.Never could the object of violationhave been depictedas more willing. In Florence Henri's self-portraitthere is a similarplay betweenflatness and fullness,as thereis a parallel sense of the phallic frameas both makerand captor of the sitter'simage. Within the spell of this comparison, the chromed balls function to project the experience of phallicism into the centerof the image, settingup (as in the Man Ray) a systemof reiterationand echo; and thisseems far more imperativelytheir role than thatof promotingthe formalvalues of stillness and balance. It can, of course,be objected thatthis comparison is tendentious.That it is a false analogy. That it suggestssome kind ofrelationship between these two artists that cannot be theresince they operate fromacross the riftthat separates two aestheticpositions: Man Ray being a surrealistand FlorenceHenri being commit- ted to an ideology of formalrigor and abstractionreceived initially from L6ger and thenfrom the Bauhaus. It can be argued thatif there is a kind of phallicism in Henri's portrait,it is thereinadvertently; she could not reallyhave intendedit. As arthistory becomes increasingly positivist, it holds more and more to the view that "intentionis some internal,prior mentalevent causally connectedwith outward effects,which remain the evidencefor its having occurred,"and thus,to say that works of art are intentional objects is to say that each bit of them is separately intended.3 But, sharing neither this positivism nor this view of consciousness,I have no scruples in using the comparativemethod to wrestthis image from the protectivehold of Miss Henri's "intention" and to open it, by analogy, to a whole range of production thatwas takingplace at the same time and in the same locale. Yet with these two images I do not mean to introduce an exercise in comparativeiconography. As I said, thearea of interestis farless in thecontents of these photographs than it is in theirframe. Which is to say that if thereis any question of phallicism here, it is to be found within the whole photographic

3. StanleyCavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, New York, Scribners,1969, pp. 226, 236.

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enterpriseof framing and therebycapturing a subject. Its conditions can be generalizedway beyond the specificsof sexual imageryto a structurallogic that subsumesthis particular image and accountsfor a wide numberof decisionsmade by photographersof this time,both with regardto subjectand to form.The name thatan entirelydifferent field of criticaltheory gives to thisstructural logic is "the economy of the supplement."4And what I intend to reveal in the relatednessof photographic practice in France and Germanyin the 1920s and '30s is a shared conception of photographyas definedby the supplement. But I am getting ahead of my argument. My reason at the outset for introducing my subject by means of comparison is that I wish to invoke the comparativemethod as such, the comparativemethod as it was introducedinto art-historicalpractice in order to focus on a wholly differentobject than thatof intention.The comparativemethod was fashioned to net the illusive historical beast called style,a preywhich, because it was transpersonal,was understoodas being quite beyondthe claims of eitherindividual authorshipor intention.This is why Wolfflinbelieved the lair of style to be the decorativearts ratherthan the domain of masterpieces,why he looked for it-Morelli-fashion-in those areas thatwould be theproduct of inattention,a lack of specific"design" -going so far as to claim that the "whole developmentof world views" was to be foundin the historyof the relationshipof gables. Now it is preciselystyle that continues to be a vexing problem foranyone dealing with surrealist art. Commenting on the formal heterogeneityof a movement that could encompass the abstractliquifaction of Mir6 on the one hand, and the dry realism of Magritteor Dali on the other, William Rubin addressesthis problem of style,declaring that "we cannot formulatea definitionof Surrealistpainting comparable in claritywith the meanings of Impressionism and Cubism."5 Yet as a scholarwho has to thinkhis way into and around themass of material that is said to be surrealist,Rubin feels in need of what he calls an "intrinsicdefinition of Surrealistpainting." And so he produceswhat he claims to be "the firstsuch definitionever proposed." His definitionis that there are two poles of surrealist endeavor-the automatist/abstractand the aca- demic/illusionist-the two poles corresponding to "the Freudian twin props of Surrealist theory,namely automatism [or free association] and dreams." Although these two pictorial modes look veryunlike indeed, Rubin continues, theycan be united around the concept of the irrationallyconceived metaphoric image. Now, in 1925 Andre Breton began to examine the subject surrealismand

4. The seminal textis Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,trans. Gayatri ChakravortySpivak, Baltimore,Johns Hopkins, 1974. 5. The referencesthroughout this paragraph are to Rubin's attempt,at the timeof theMuseum of Modern Artexhibition Dada, Surrealism,and Their Heritage,of which he was curator,to produce a concise syntheticstatement which would serve as a theoryof surrealiststyle. See William Rubin, "Toward a Critical Framework,"Artforum, vol. V, no. 1 (September1966), 36.

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painting, and fromthe outset he characterizedhis material in termsof the very twin poles-automatism and dream-and the subject matterof Rubin's later definition.6If fortyyears afterward Rubin was so unhappy with Breton'sattempt at a syntheticstatement that he had to claim to have produced the firstsuch definitionever, it is undoubtedlybecause Rubin, like everyoneelse, has been unconvinced that Breton's was a definitionin the firstplace. If one wishes to produce a synthesisbetween A and B, it is not enough simplyto say, "A plus B." A synthesisis ratherdifferent from a list. And it has long been apparent that a catalogue of subject matterheld in common is neithernecessary nor sufficientto produce the kind of coherenceone is referringto by the notion of style. If Rubin's nondefinitionis a mirror-imageof Breton's earlier one, this relationshipis important,because it locates Breton'sown theoryas a sourcefor the problem confrontingall subsequent discussions.But Breton,as the most central

6. Andre Breton,"Le Surrealismeet la peinture,"La Rbvolution surr'aliste. vol. 1 (July 1925), 26-30. The complete seriesof essayswas collectedin Breton,Surrealism and Painting, trans.Simon Watson Taylor, New York, Harper & Row, Icon edition, 1972. Furtherreferences are to this transla- tion.

Maurice Tabard. Hand and Woman. 1929. Raoul Ubac. La Nibuleuse. 1939.

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spokesman for surrealism,is an obstacle one must surmount;one cannot avoid him, if theissue is to deal with the movementcomprehensively-as one must if a syntheticnotion like styleis involved. The same failureto thinkthe formal heterogeneity of Mir6 and Magritteinto somethinglike stylisticunity plagues everyeffort of Bretonas theoreticianof the movement.Attempting to definesurrealism, Breton produces instead a seriesof contradictionswhich; like the one between the linearityof Magritte and the colorismof Mir6, strikeone as being irreducible. Thus, Breton introduces"Surrealism and Painting" with a declarationof the absolute value of vision among the sensory modes. Rejecting the late nineteenth-centurydictum that all artshould aspire to the conditionof music, an idea verymuch alive among twentieth-centuryabstract artists, Breton insists that "visual images attain what music never can," and he bids this great medium farewellwith the words, "so may nightcontinue to descendupon the orchestra." His hymnof praise to vision had begun, "The eye existsin its savage state.The marvelsof the earth.. . have as theirsole witnessthe wild eye that tracesall its colors back to the rainbow." And by thisstatement he is contrastingthe immedi-

Brassai.Temptation of St. Anthony.1935.

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acy of vision-its perceptual automatism, as it were-to the premeditated, reflectivegait of thought.The savagenessof vision is good, pure,uncontaminated by ratiocination; the calculations of reason (which Breton never fails to call "bourgeois reason") are controlling,degenerate, bad. Besides being untaintedby reason,vision's primacyresults from the way its objects are presentto it, throughan immediacyand transparencythat compels belief.Indeed, Bretonoften presents surrealism-as-a-whole as definedby visuality. In the FirstManifesto he locates the veryinvention of psychicautomatism within the experience of hypnogogic images-that is, of half-waking,half-dreaming, visual experience. But as we know, the privilegedplace of vision in surrealismis immediately challenged by a medium given a greaterprivilege: namely, writing. Psychic automatismis itselfa writtenform, a "scribblingon paper," a textualproduction. And when it is transferredto thedomain ofvisual practice,as in thework of Andre Masson, automatismis no less understoodas a kind of writing.Breton describes Masson's automaticdrawings as being essentiallycursive, scriptorial, the result of "this hand, enamouredof its own movementand of thatalone." "Indeed," Breton writes, "the essential discovery of surrealism is that, without preconceived intention,the pen thatflows in orderto writeand thepencil thatruns in orderto draw spin an infinitelyprecious substance."7So, in the veryessay thathad begun by extollingthe visual and insistingon the impossibilityof imagining a "picture as being otherthan a window," Bretonproceeds definitively to choose writingover vision, expressing his distaste for the "other road available to Surrealism," namely,"the stabilizingof dreamimages in the kindof still-lifedeception known as trompe l'oeil (and the very word 'deception' betrays the weakness of the process)."' Now this distinction between writing and vision is one of the many antinomies that Breton speaks of wanting surrealismto dissolve in the higher synthesisof a surrealitywhich will, in thiscase, "resolvethe dualism ofperception and representation."'' It is an old antinomy within Westernculture, and one which does not simply hold these two thingsto be opposite formsof experience, but places one higher than the other. Perception is better,truer, because it is immediate to experience, while representationmust always remain suspect because it is neveranything but a copy,a re-creationin anotherform, a setof signs forexperience. Perception gives directlyonto the real,while representationis set at an unbridgeabledistance fromit, making realitypresent only in the formof substitutes,that is, throughthe proxies of signs. Because of its distancefrom the real, representationcan thus be suspectedof fraud. In preferringthe products of a cursive automatism to those of visual,

7. Breton,Surrealism and Painting, p. 68. 8. Ibid., p. 70. 9. AndreBreton, "Oceanie" (1948), reprintedin Breton,La Cle des champs,Paris, Sagittaire,1953, 1973 edition,p. 278.

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imagistic depiction, Breton appears to be reversingthe classical preferenceof vision to writing,of immediacyto dissociation.For in Breton'sdefinition, it is the pictorial image that is suspect,a "deception,"while the cursiveone is true.1' Yet in some ways this apparent reversal does not really overthrowthe traditionalPlatonic dislike of representation,because the visual imageryBreton suspectsis a pictureand thus therepresentation of a dreamrather than thedream itself.Breton, therefore, continues Westernculture's fear of representationas an invitation to deceit. And the truthof the cursiveflow of automatistwriting or drawing is less a representationof something than it is a manifestationor recording:like the lines tracedon paper by the seismographor the cardiograph. What this cursiveweb makes presentby making visible is a directexperience of what Breton calls "rhythmicunity," which he goes on to characterizeas "the absence of contradiction,the relaxation of emotional tensionsdue to repression,a lack of the sense of time, and the replacementof externalreality by a psychic realityobeying the pleasure principle alone."" Thus the unityproduced by the web of automatic drawing is akin to what Freud called the oceanic feeling-the infantile,libidinal domain of pleasure not yetconstrained by civilizationand its discontents."Automatism," Breton declares, "leads us in a straightline to this

10. Thus, Breton insists that "any form of expression in which automatism does not at least advance undercoverruns a graverisk of moving out of the surrealistorbit" (Surrealismand Painting, p. 68). 11. Ibid.

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Roger Parry. Illustration for Leon-Paul Fargue, J.-A.Boiffard. Illustration for Andre Breton, Banalit&,1928. Nadja, 1928.

This content downloaded from 204.147.202.25 on Sun, 8 Sep 2013 11:08:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions region," and the regionhe has in mind is theunconscious.12 With thisdirectness, automatism makes the unconscious, the oceanic feeling,present. Automatism may be writing,but it is not, like the restof thewritten signs of Westernculture, representation.It is a kind of presence,the directpresence of the artist'sinner self.'3This sense of automatismas a manifestationof the innermostself, and thus not representationat all, is also contained within Breton'sdescription of automatic writingas "spoken thought."Thought is not a representationbut is that which is utterlytransparent to the mind, immediateto experience,untainted by the distanceand exteriorityof signs. But this commitmentto automatismand writingas a special modalityof presence,and a consequentdislike of representationas a cheat,is not consistentin Breton,who contradictshimself on thismatter as he contradictshimself on almost everypoint in surrealisttheory. In many places we findBreton declaring, "It makes no differencewhether there remains a perceptibledifference between beings which are evoked and beings which are present,since I dismiss such differences out of hand at everymoment of mylife.""4 And as we will see, thewelcome Breton

12. Ibid. 13. In Breton'swords, "The emotional intensitystored up within the poet or painter at a given moment.... " (Surrealismand Painting, p. 68). 14. Ibid., p. 2.

This content downloaded from 204.147.202.25 on Sun, 8 Sep 2013 11:08:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Left: Man Ray. Untitled(rayograph). 1923.

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accords to representation,to signs, is verygreat indeed, forrepresentation is the verycore of his definitionof ConvulsiveBeauty, and ConvulsiveBeauty is another term for the Marvelous, which is the great talismanic concept at the heart of surrealismitself. The contradictionsabout the prioritiesof vision and representation,presence and sign, are typicalof the confusionswithin surrealisttheory. And these contradictionsare focusedall the more clearlyif one reflectson Breton'sposition on photography.Given his aversion to "the real formsof real objects," and his insistence on another order of experience,we would expect Breton to despise photography.As thequintessentially realist medium, photography would have to be rejectedby the poet who insisted that "fora total revisionof real values, the plastic work of art will eitherrefer to a purely internalmodel or will cease to exist."15 But in factBreton has a curious tolerancefor photography. Of thefirst two artiststhat he claimed forsurrealism proper-Max Ernstand Man Ray-one of themwas a photographer.And if we imagine thathe accepted Man Ray on the

15. Ibid., p. 4. Breton goes on to express his distastefor what he calls photography'spositivist values, assertingthat "in the final analysis it is not the faithfulimage that we aim to retain of something"(p. 32).

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Brassai. Illustrationfor Andre Breton,L'Amour fou, 1937. basis of thepresumed anti-realism of therayographs, this is in factnot so. Breton protestedagainst characterizingthe rayographs as abstractor makingany distinction between Man Ray's cameraless photography and that produced with a normal lens.16But evenmore than his supportfor specific photographers, Breton's placementof photographyat the veryheart of surrealistpublication is startling. In 1925 he had asked, "and when will all the books thatare worthanything stop being illustratedwith drawingsand appear only with photographs?"'7 This was not an idle question, for Breton's next threemajor works were indeed "illustrated"with photographs. Nadja (1928) bore images almost exclusively by Boiffard;Les Vases communicants (1932) has a few film stills and photographic documents; and the illustrativematerial forL'Amour fou (1937) was divided for the most part betweenMan Ray and Brassai. Within the high oneiric atmosphereof thesebooks, thepresence of thephotographs strikes one as extremelyeccentric-an appendage to the text that is as mysteriousin its motivationas theimages themselvesare banal. In writingabout surrealismWalter Benjamin focuseson the curious presenceof these "illustrations." In such passages photographyintervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets,gates, squares of thecity into illustrationsof a trashy novel, draws offthe banal obviousness of this ancient architectureto inject it with themost pristine intensity towards the events described, to which, as in old chambermaids'books, word-for-wordquotations with page numbersrefer.'" But photography'spresumed eccentricity to surrealistthought and practice must itself be reconsidered.For it was not injected into the veryheart of the surrealisttext only in the work of Breton;it was the major visual resourceof the surrealistperiodicals. The founding publication of the movement,La Revolu- tion surrealiste,bore no visual relation to the vanguardisttypographic extrava- ganzas of the Dada broadsheets.Rather, at the instigationof PierreNaville, it was modeled specificallyon the scientificmagazine La Nature. Conceived almost exclusively as the publication of documents,the firstissues of La Rbvolution surrealistecarried two typesof verbal testimony:specimens of automaticwriting and recordsof dreams. Sober columns of testcarrying this data are juxtaposed

16. The protestwas against attitudeslike thatof Ribemont-Dessaignes,who, in introducinga 1924 Man Ray exhibition, honored "these abstractphotographs.. . that put us in contact with a new universe." 17. This question had begun, "The photographicprint .. is permeatedwith an emotivevalue that makes it a supremelyprecious articleof exchange" (Surrealismand Painting, p. 32). 18. WalterBenjamin, "Surrealism:The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,"in Reflec- tions, trans.Edmund Jephcott,New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1978, p. 183.

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with visual material, most of it Man Ray's photographs,all of it having the documentaryimpact of illustrativeevidence. Naville's hostilityto the traditionalfine arts was well known,and the third issue of the journal carried his declaration: "I have no tastes except distaste. Masters,master-crooks, smear your canvases. Everyone knows thereis no surrealist painting. Neitherthe marksof a pencil abandoned to the accidentof gesture,nor the image retracing the forms of the dream .... " But spectacles, he insists, are acceptable. "Memory and the pleasure of the eyes," Naville writes,"that is the whole aesthetic." The list of things conducive to this visual pleasure includes streets,kiosks, automobiles, cinema, and photographs."9 One of the effectsof the extraordinary1978 Hayward Gallery exhibition, Dada and SurrealismReviewed, was to begin to forceattention away fromthe pictorial and sculptural production that surrounds surrealism and onto the periodicals, demonstratingthe way that journals formedthe armatureof these

19. Pierre Naville, "Beaux-Arts,"La Revolution surrialiste,vol. 1 (April 1925), 27. It was in deferenceto Naville and others that, when later in the year Breton launched his support of the enterpriseof thefine arts, he had neverthelessto beginby referring to "thatlamentable expedient which is painting."

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movements. Witnessing the parade of surrealist magazines-La Revolution surrialiste,Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution,Documents, Minotaure, Marie, The InternationalSurrealist Bulletin, VVV, Le Surrealisme,mime, and many others-one becomes convinced that theymore than anythingelse are the trueobjects produced by surrealism.And with thisconviction comes an inescap- able association to the most importantstatement yet made about the vocation of photography:Benjamin's "The Work of Artin theAge of Mechanical Reproduc- tion," and fromthere to one of the phenomena that Benjamin speaks of in the course of sketchingthe new terrainof art-after-photography,namely, the illus- tratedmagazine, which is to say, photograph plus text. At the verymoment when Benjamin was making his analysis,the surrealists were quite independentlyputting it into practice.And thatthey were doing so is somethingthat traditional art history, with its eyefocused on worksof fineart, has tendedto miss. If we add these two things together:namely the primacy the surrealists themselvesgave to the illustrativephotograph, and thefailure of stylisticconcepts derived from the formal, pictorial code-distinctions like linear/painterlyor representational/abstract-toforge any kind of unityfrom the apparentdiversity of surrealistproduction, the failure to arrive,that is, at what Rubin called an intrinsicdefinition of surrealism,we might be led to the possibility that it is withinthe photographic rather than thepictorial code thatsuch a definitionis to be found-that is, that issues of surrealistheterogeneity will be resolvedaround thesemiological functionsof photographyrather than theformal properties oper- ating the traditionalart-historical classifications of style.What is at stake, then, is the relocation of photographyfrom its eccentricposition relativeto surrealism to one thatis absolutelycentral-definitive, one might say. Now, it may be objected thatin turningto photographyfor a principle of unification,one is simply replacing one set of problems with another. For the same visual heterogeneityreigns within the domain of surrealistphotography as within its painting and sculpture. Quickly examining the range of surrealist photographic forms,we can think of 1) the absolutely banal images Boiffard createdfor Breton's Nadja; 2) theless banal but stillstraight photographs made by Boiffardfor Documents in 1929,such as theones made forGeorges Bataille's essay on the big toe; 3) still "straight,"but raising certainquestions about thestatus of photographic evidence, the documentationsof sculptural objects that have no existenceapart fromthe photograph,which were immediatelydismantled after being recorded(examples are by Hans Bellmerand Man Ray); moving,then, into the greatrange of processesused to manipulate the image; 4) the frequentuse of negative printing;5) the recourse to multiple exposure or sandwich printingto produce montageeffects; 6) variouskinds of manipulationswith mirrors, as in the Kert sz Distortionseries; 7) the two processesmade famous by Man Ray, namely solarizationand thecameraless image of therayograph-the latterhaving a rather obvious appeal to surrealistsensibilities because of thecursive, graphic quality of

J.-A. Boiffard.Illustration for Georges Bataille, "Le Gros Orteil," Documents, no. 6, 1929.

This content downloaded from 204.147.202.25 on Sun, 8 Sep 2013 11:08:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Man Ray. Man. 1918. Hans Bellmer.La Poupee.1934.

the images against theirflattened, abstracted ground and because of thepsycholog- ical status these ghosts of objects seem to have attained-Ribemont-Dessaignes calling them "these objects of dreams," Man Ray himselflocating them more within the domain of memoryby theireffect of "recalling the eventmore or less clearly,like the undisturbedashes of an object consumed by flames";208) the technique Raoul Ubac called brfilage,in which the emulsion is burned (which literalizesMan Ray's evocativedescription of the rayograph),the process having arisen from an attempt to assimilate photography fully into the domain of automaticpractice, just as the seriesof graphic manipulations thatBrassai made in themid-1930s attempted to open photographicinformation to a directrelation- ship with a kind of automatist,drawn image. Long as this list is, thereis one formstill missing fromit, namely,photomontage. This form, pioneered by Dada, was rarely employed by surrealist photographers,though it was attractiveto certain of the surrealistpoets, who made photomontagesthemselves. One importantexample is AndreBreton's 1938 self-portraitentitled Automatic Writing. Breton'sself-portrait, fabricated from various photographicelements, is not only an example of photomontage-a processdistinct from combination printing insofaras the termrefers, for the most part,to the cuttingup and reassemblingof alreadyprinted material-but it is also an instanceof constructionen abyme.It is themicroscope as representativeof a lensedinstrument that places withinthe field of therepresentation another representation that reduplicates an aspectof thefirst, namelythe photographic process by which theparts were originally made. And if

20. Man Ray, Exhibition Rayographs 1921-1928,Stuttgart, L.G.A., 1963.

This content downloaded from 204.147.202.25 on Sun, 8 Sep 2013 11:08:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions AndreKerthsz. Distortion. 1933.

Bretondoes this, it is to set up the intellectualrhyme between psychic automatism as a process of mechanical recordingand the automatismassociated with the camera-"that blind instrument,"as Breton says. His own association of these two mechanical means of registrationoccurs as early as 1920, when he declaredthat "automatic writing, which appeared at theend of the 19thcentury, is a truephotography of thought."21 But if an icon of the lens's automatismis placed inside this image entitled Ecriture-Automatique,what, we mightask, of theconcept of writingitself? Is that not entirelyforeign to the purelyvisual experienceof photography-a visuality itselfsymbolized as heightenedand intensifiedby thepresence of themicroscope? Faced with this image and its caption, are we not confrontedwith yet another instance of the constant juxtaposition of writing and vision, a juxtaposition that leads nowhere but to theoreticalconfusion? It is my intentionto show that this time it leads not to confusionbut to clarity,to exactlythe kind of dialectical synthesisof opposites thatBreton had set out as theprogram for surrealism. For what I wish to claim is that the notion of ecritureis picturedinside this work throughthe veryfabric of the image's making, that is, throughthe medium of montage. Throughout the avant-gardein the 1920s,photomontage was understoodas a means of infiltratingthe mere picture of realitywith its meaning. This was achieved throughjuxtaposition: of image with image, or image with drawing,or image with text.John Heartfieldsaid, "A photographcan, by the addition of an

21. In a text introducing Ernst's Fatagaga photomontages,reprinted in Max Ernst, Beyond Painting and Other Writingsby the Artistand His Friends,New York, WittenbornSchultz, 1948, p. 177.

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unimportantspot of color, become a photomontage,a work of art of a special kind."22And what kind this was to be is explained by Tretyakovwhen he wrote, "If the photograph, under the influenceof the text (or caption), expressesnot simply the factwhich it shows, but also the social tendencyexpressed by the fact, thenthis is alreadya photomontage."23 Aragon secondedthis insistence on a sense of realitybearing its own interpretationwhen he describedHeartfield's work, "As he was playing with the fireof appearance, realitytook firearound him.... The scraps of photographsthat he formerlymanoeuvred for the pleasure of stupefac- tion, under his fingersbegan to signify."24 This insistenceon significationas a political act, on a revisionof photography away fromthe surfacesof thereal, was preached by BertoltBrecht, who said, "A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about these institutions.... Thereforesomething has activelyto be constructed,something artificial,something set-up."25 This was a position thatwas uncongenial to the

22. John Heartfield,Photomontages of the Nazi Period, New York, UniverseBooks, 1977,p. 26. 23. Ibid. 24. Louis Aragon, "John Heartfieldet la beaute revolutionnaire"(1935), reprinted in Aragon,Les Collages, Paris, Hermann, 1965,pp. 78-79. 25. In WalterBenjamin, "A ShortHistory of Photography," trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1972), 24. . ...

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proto-surrealistMax Ernst,who dismissed the Berlin dadaists with the words, "C'est vraimentallemand. Les intellectuelsallemands ne peuventpas faireni caca ni pipi sans des ideologies."26But photomontagewas nonethelessthe medium of theFatagagas and remainedan abiding principal in Ernst'slater work; and when Aragon wrote about the effectof the separate elementsin Ernst's montages he comparedthem to "words."27By thishe refersnot only to thetransparency of each signifyingelement (by contrastwith the opacity of the pieces of cubistcollages), but also to the experienceof each elementas a separateunit which,like a word,is conditioned by its placement within the syntagmaticchain of the sentence,is controlledby the condition of syntax. Whetherwe thinkof syntaxas temporal--asthe pure successionof one word afteranother within the unreeling of thespoken sentence;or whetherwe thinkof it as spatial-as theserial progression of separate units on theprinted page; syntax in either dimension reduces to the basic exteriorityof one unit to another. Traditional linguisticscontemplates this pure exteriorityas thatfissure or gap or blank thatexists between signs, separating them one fromthe other, just as it also

26. Cited in Dawn Ades, Photomontage,New York, Pantheon, 1976,p. 19. 27. Louis Aragon, "La Peintureau dffi,"in Les Collages, p. 44.

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X-:-i-ii:i:"'::::::-:::-?i_:-:-?i?-I:?-:-:i:: :z-l-i:?61?';'-'-i:::::-:::::: ::::i'~--::--i:?-::::: :::::':: :::I::`: i:i; i:il-ici?ili iii-i--:i-~ ~::?-i.~?~2:-~:i-:::''''i?:::::-:::?::: LiBii~-~~ ~:-:~~.19-li:~IFF~hL-6 Far left:Andrb Breton. L'Icriture automatique. 1938. : :i---i;:-i-ii-i:... iil-iQ -i:i:Zsi?--.--i:i k~~iiii'-':''':"''l::::: i-i-il~i--:---:-~?-::i-d:'::-:::- ::? ::;::::::::j::::::i::::i:: -:::::::: Left:John Heartfield. Durch Licht zur Nacht. 10, ::-g::I-----::':----':::-'-''?B~i~i:i I?~B~,-?~:,~~i-! May I-:6 1933. Bi.l? _-_: ?::: ::-:--: ::: ... . ::'. .. i.::i?ii~:--;;;:??-:~i?::-li~,,--l'-i::g~ iiiii-ii.' : i:i?::--:-iiiiiiiiiiiii~iiii,;i_~:ii-ii---::i:r::::::::: ?:r::::~?r:r'-:':::::-:::-i::-:::l::ii~l:?:,iiii:':i-i:i~~i~ir:-iii:i~ii::::-:i:.::.:?-::: :::?;:: ::::~ _:::::::::j::_:-::1 ::: :-? -:.??-_:----: ?:: i: :.::::::::::: ._..:-W':: :?;_ :;:::::.: :: . :::r?::: This page: Raoul Hausman. ABCD. 1923-4. ?:::-::j:::::--s.:--I-;~~~ :-:::::::---:?;?i:.-.;--..:-l1:::: :::::

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thinks of the units of the sign itselfas riven into two parts-one irremediably outside or exteriorto the other.The two parts are signifiedand signifier-thefirst themeaning of thesign, a meaning transparentto thoughtheld withinconscious- ness; thesecond, themark or sound thatis the sign's materialvehicle. "The order of thesignified," Derrida writes, stating the position of traditionallinguistics, "is nevercontemporary, is at bestthe subtly discrepant inverse or parallel--discrepant by the time of a breath-fromthe order of the signifier."28For Derrida,of course, spacing is not an exterioritythat signals the outsideboundaries of meaning: one signified's end before another's onset. Rather, spacing is radicalized as the preconditionfor meaning as such, and the outsidenessof spacing is revealedas already constitutingthe condition of the "inside." This movement,in which spacing "invaginates" presence, will be shown to illuminate the distinction betweensurrealist photography and its dada predecessor. In dada montage the experience of blanks or spacing is verystrong, for between the silhouettesof the photographedforms the white page announces itselfas themedium that both combines and separatesthem. The whitepage is not

28. Derrida,Of Grammatology,p. 18.

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This page: Hannah Hoch. Cut with the Cake-Knife. 1919. -~ATh

Right: Man Ray. Lilies. 1930.

Far right: Roger Parry. Illustration for Leon-Paul Fargue, BanalitY,1928.

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theopaque surfaceof cubistcollage, assertingthe formal and materialunity of the visual support; the white page is rather the fluid matrix within which each representationof reality is secured in isolation, held within a condition of exteriority,of syntax,of spacing. The photographic image, thus "spaced," is deprivedof one of the most powerfulof photography'smany illusions. It is robbed of a sense of presence. Photography'svaunted capture of a momentin timeis the seizureand freezingof presence.It is the image of simultaneity,of theway thateverything within a given space at a given moment is presentto everythingelse; it is a declarationof the seamless integrityof the real. The photographcarries on one continuoussurface the traceor imprintof all thatvision capturesin one glance. The photographic image is not only a trophyof this reality,but a documentof its unity as thatwhich-was-present-at-one-time.But spacing destroyssimultaneous presence: for it shows things sequentially,either one afteranother or externalto one another- occupyingseparate cells. It is spacing thatmakes it clear-as it was to Heartfield, Tretyakov,Brecht, Aragon-that we are not looking at reality,but at the world infestedby interpretationor signification,which is to say,reality distended by the gaps or blanks which are the formalpreconditions of the sign. Now, as I said, the surrealistphotographers rarely used photomontage. Their interestwas in the seamless unity of the print,with no intrusionsof the

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white page. By preservingthe body of the print intact,they could make it read photographically, that is to say, in direct contact with reality. But without exceptionthe surrealistphotographers infiltrated the body of thisprint, this single page, with spacing. Sometimes they mimicked photomontage by means of combinationprinting. But thatis theleast interestingof theirstrategies, because it does not create,forcefully enough, an experienceof the real itselfas sign, thereal fracturedby spacing. The cloisonne of the solarized print is to a greaterextent testimonyto this kindof cleavage in reality.As are themomentarily unintelligible gaps createdby negativeprinting. But more importantthan anythingelse is the strategyof doubling. For it is doubling that produces the formal rhythmof spacing-the two-stepthat banishes the unitarycondition of the moment,that createswithin the momentan experienceof fission.For it is doubling thatelicits the notion that to an original has been added its copy. The double is the simulacrum,the second, therepresentative of the original. It comes afterthe first, and in this following,it can only exist as figure,or image. But in being seen in conjunctionwith the original,the double destroysthe pure singularityof thefirst. Through duplication,it opens theoriginal to theeffect of difference,of deferral,of one-thing-after-another,or within another:of multiples burgeoningwithin the same. This sense of deferral,of opening realityto the "intervalof a breath,"we have been calling (followingDerrida) spacing. But doubling does somethingelse

Top left: Man Ray. Published in La Revolution surr&aliste,no. 1 (1924).

Lower left:Frederick Sommer. Illustrationfor VVV (1944).

This page: Bill Brandt.Perspective of Nudes.

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besides the transmutationof presence into succession. It marks the firstin the chain as a signifyingelement: it transmutesraw matterinto theconventionalized form of the signifier.LUvi-Strauss describes the importanceof pure phonemic doubling in the onset of linguistic experiencein infancy-the child's dawning knowledgeof signs. Even at the babbling stage thephoneme group /pa/ can be heard. But the differencebetween /pa/ and /papa/ does not reside simply in reduplication: /pa/ is a noise, /papa/ is a word. The reduplication indicatesintent on thepart of thespeaker; it endows thesecond syllable with a functiondifferent from that which would have been performed by the firstseparately, or in the formof a potentiallylimitless series of identical sounds /papapapa/ produced by mere babbling. Therefore the second /pa/ is not a repetitionof the first,nor has it the same signification.It is a sign that,like itself,the first/pa/ too was a sign, and that as a pair theyfall into the categoryof signifiers,not of things signified.29

Repetition is thus the indicator that the "wild sounds" of babbling have been made deliberate,intentional; and that what theyintend is meaning. Doubling is in this sense the "signifierof signification.'"30 From the perspectiveof formedlanguage, the phonemes /pa/ or /ma/seem less like wild sounds and more like verbalelements in potentia.But ifwe thinkof theinfant's production of gutturalsand glottalstops, and othersounds thatdo not forma part of spoken English,we have a strongersense of thisbabbling as theraw material of sonic reality.Thus /pa/ moving to /papa/ seems less disconnected fromthe case of photographic doubling, where the materialof the image is the world in frontof the camera. As I said above, surrealistphotography exploits the special connection to realitywith which all photographyis endowed.For photographyis an imprintor transferoff the real; it is a photochemicallyprocessed trace causally connectedto that thing in the world to which it refersin a manner parallel to that of fingerprintsor footprintsor the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables. The photograph is thus generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing.On the familytree of images it is closer to palm prints,death masks,the Shroud of Turin, or the tracksof gulls on beaches. For technicallyand semiologi- cally speaking,drawings and paintings are icons, while photographsare indexes. Given this special status with regard to the real, being, that is, a kind of deposit of the real itself, the manipulations wrought by the surrealist

29. Claude Lkvi-Strauss,The Raw and the Cooked, trans.J. and D. Weightman,New York,Harper 8cRow, 1970,pp. 339-340. 30. Ibid. See Craig Owens, "Photographyen abyme," October,no. 5 (Summer 1978), 73-88, for anotheruse of this passage in the analysis of photography.

This content downloaded from 204.147.202.25 on Sun, 8 Sep 2013 11:08:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Hans Bellmer. La Poupee. 1934. Maurice Tabard. Solarized Guitar. 1933.

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photographers--thespacings and doublings-are intendedto registerthe spac- ings and doublings of that veryreality of which this photograph is merelythe faithfultrace. In this way the photographic medium is exploited to produce a paradox: the paradox of realityconstituted as sign-or presencetransformed into absence, into representation,into spacing, into writing. Now this is the move thatlies at the veryheart of surrealistthinking, for it is preciselythis experienceof realityas representationthat constitutes the notion of the Marvelous or of Convulsive Beauty-the key concepts of surrealism.31To- wards the beginningof L'Amour fou thereis a sectionthat Breton had published on its own under the title "Beauty Will Be Convulsive .... " In this manifesto Bretoncharacterizes Convulsive Beauty in termsof threebasic typesof example. The firstfalls under the general case of mimicry-or those instances in nature when one thing imitates another-the most familiar, perhaps, being those markingson the wings of moths thatimitate eyes. Breton is enormouslyattracted to mimicry,as were all the surrealists,Documents having, for example, published Blossfeldt'sphotographs of plant lifeimitating the volutes and flutingsof classical architecture.In "Beauty Will Be Convulsive" theinstances of mimicryBreton uses are the coral imitationsof plants on the Great BarrierReef and "The Imperial Mantle," from a grotto near Montpellier, where a wall of quartz offersthe spectacleof natural carving,producing the image ofdrapery "which foreverdefies thatof statuary."Mimicry is thus an instanceof the natural productionof signs, of one thing in nature contortingitself into a representationof another. Breton'ssecond example is "the expirationof movement"-the experienceof something that should be in motion but has been stopped, derailed, or, as Duchamp would have said, "delayed." In this regardBreton writes, "I am sorry not to be able to reproduce,among the illustrationsto thistext, a photographof a very handsome locomotive afterit had been abandoned for many years to the delirium of a virgin forest.''32 That Breton should have wanted to show a photograph of this object is compelling because the veryidea of stop-motionis intrinsicallyphotographic. The convulsiveness,then, the arousal in frontof the object, is to a perception of it detached from the continuum of its natural existence,a detachmentwhich deprivesthe locomotive of some part of itsphysical self and turns it into a sign of the reality it no longer possesses. The still photographof thisstilled train would thus be a representationof an object already constitutedas a representation. Breton's third example consists of the found-object or found verbal fragment-both instances of objective chance-where an emissary from the externalworld carriesa message informingthe recipientof his own desire.The found-objectis a sign of that desire. The particular object Breton uses at the

31. Louis Aragon's 1925 definitionof the Marvelous reads, "Le merveilleux,c'est la contradiction qui apparait dans le reel" ("Idees," La Revolution surrhaliste,vol. I [April 1925] 30). 32. Andre Breton,L'Amour fou, Paris, Gallimard, 1937,p. 13.

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opening of L'Amour fou is a perfectdemonstration of Convulsive Beauty's condition as sign. The object is a slipper-spoon that Breton found in a flea market,and which he recognized as a fulfillmentof the wish spoken by the automatic phrase that had begun running through his mind some months before-the phrase cendrierCendrillon, or Cinderella ashtray.The flea-market object became something that signifiedfor him as he began to see it as an extraordinarymise-en-abyme: a chain of reduplicationsto infinityin which the spoon and handle of theobject was seen as thefront and last ofa shoe of which the littlecarved slipper was theheel. Then thatslipper was imaginedas having forits heel anotherslipper, and so on to infinity.Breton read the naturalwriting of this chain of reduplicatedslippers as signifyinghis own desirefor love and thusas the sign that begins the quest of L'Amour fou.33 If we are to generalizethe aestheticof surrealism,the conceptof Convulsive Beauty is at the core of that aesthetic: reducing to an experience of reality transformedinto representation.Surreality is, we could say,nature convulsed into a kind of writing.The special access thatphotography has to thisexperience is its privileged connection to the real. The manipulations then available to photography-what we have been calling doubling and spacing-appear to documentthese convulsions. The photographsare not interpretationsof reality, decoding it, as in Heartfield'sphotomontages. They are presentationsof thatvery realityas configured,or coded, or written.The experienceof nature as sign, or nature as representation,comes "naturally" then to photography.It extends,as well, to thatdomain most inherentlyphotographic, which is thatof theframing

33. Ibid., pp. 35-41.

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Man Ray.Illustration for Andre Breton, L'Amour fou, 193-7.

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edge of the image experiencedas cut or cropped. But I would add, thoughthere is no space here to expand on it, that what unites all surrealistproduction is preciselythis experienceof nature as representation,physical matteras writing. This is of course not a morphological coherence,but a semiological one. No account of surrealistphotography would be complete if it could not incorporate the unmanipulated images that figurein the movement's pub- lications-works like the Boiffardbig toes, or the "Involuntary Sculptures" photographedby Brassai forSalvador Dali, or thestraight image ofa hattedfigure by Man Ray made for Minotaure. Because it is this type that is closest to the movement'sheart. But the theoreticalapparatus by which to assimilatethis genre of photograph has already been developed. And that is the concept of spacing. Inside theimage, spacing can be generatedby thecloisonne of solarizationor the use of found framesto interruptor displace segmentsof reality. But at thevery boundary of the image the camera framewhich crops or cuts the represented elementout of reality-at-largecan be seen as anotherexample ofspacing. Spacing is the indication of a break in the simultaneous experienceof the real, a rupture that issues into sequence. Photographic cropping is always experienced as a rupture in the continuous fabric of reality. But surrealistphotography puts enormouspressure on thatframe to make it itselfread as a sign-an emptysign it is true,but an integerin the calculus of meaning: a signifierof signification. The frameannounces thatbetween the part of realitythat was cut away and this part thereis a difference;and thatthis segmentwhich the frameframes is an example of nature-as-representation,nature-as-sign. As it signals thatexperience of realitythe camera framealso controlsit, configuresit. This it does by point-of- view, as in the Man Ray example,or byfocal length,as in theextreme close-ups of the Dali. And in both these instanceswhat the camera framesand therebymakes visible is the automaticwriting of theworld: the constant,uninterrupted production of signs. Dali's images are of those nastypieces of paper like bus ticketsand theaterstubs that we roll into little columns in our pockets,or those pieces of eraserthat we unconsciouslyknead-these are what his camera producesthrough the enlargementsthat he publishes as involuntarysculpture. Man Ray's photograph is one of several to accompany an essay by,Tristan Tzara about the unconscious productionof sexual imagerythroughout all aspectsof culture-this particularone being the design of hats. The frameannounces the camera's abilityto findand isolate what we could call the world's constantwriting of erotic symbols,its ceaseless automatism.In thiscapacity the framecan itselfbe glorified,represented, as in thephotograph by Man Ray that I introduced at the outset. Or it can simply be there,silently operatingas spacing, as in Brassai's seizureof automaticproduction in his series on graffiti. And now, with this experienceof the frame,we arriveat the supplement. Throughout Europe in the twentiesand thirties,camera-seeing was exalted as a special formof vision: the New Vision, Moholy-Nagycalled it. From theInkhuk

Brassal. Photographs for Salvador Dali, Sculptures Involontaires.Published in Minotaure (1933).

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to theBauhaus to the ateliersof Montparnasse,the New Vision was understoodin the same way. As Moholy explained it, human eyesightwas, simply,defective, weak, impotent."Helmholtz," Moholy explained, "used to tell his pupils thatif an optician were to succeed in making a human eye and broughtit to him forhis approval, he would be bound to say: 'This is a clumsypiece of work.'" But the inventionof the camera has made up forthis deficiency so thatnow "we may say thatwe see the world with differenteyes."34 These, of course,are camera-eyes.They see faster,sharper, at strangerangles, closer-to,microscopically, with a transpositionof tonalities,with thepenetration of X ray,and with access to themultiplication of images thatmakes possible the writing of association and memory. Camera-seeing is thus an extraordinary extensionof normal vision,one thatsupplements the deficiencies of thenaked eye. The camera covers and arms this nakedness, it acts as a kind of prosthesis, enlargingthe capacityof the human body. But in increasingthe ways in which the world can be presentto vision, the

34. Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy,Vision in Motion, Chicago, 1947,p. 206.

Man Ray. Illustration for Tzara, "D'un Certain Automatismedu Gout," Minotaure (1933).

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Umbo.Self-Portrait. c. 1930. camera mediates that presence,gets between the viewer and the world, shapes realityaccording to its terms.Thus what supplementsand enlargeshuman vision also supplants the viewerhimself; the camera is the aid who comes to usurp. The experienceof the cameraas prosthesisand theimage of it figuringin the fieldof thephotograph is everywhereto be foundin the New Vision.35In Umbo's self-portraitthe camera is representedby a cast shadow whose relationshipto the photographer'seyes involves the interesting paradox ofall supplementarydevices, wherethe verything that extends, displaces as well. In thisimage thecamera that

35. See my "Jump over the Bauhaus," October,no. 15 (Winter1980), 103-110.

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literallyexpands Umbo's vision, allowing him to see himself,also maskshis eyes, nearlyextinguishing them in shadow. Florence Henri's self-portraitfunctions in similarways. There the camera's frameis revealedas thatwhich mastersor dominatesthe subject,and thephallic shape she constructsfor its symbolis continuouswith theform that most of world culture has used for the expression of supremacy. The supplement is thus experiencedemblematically, through the internalizedrepresentation of the camera frameas an image of mastery:camera-seeing essentialized as a superiorpower of focus and selectionfrom within the inchoate sprawl of the real. Throughout Europe in the 1920s therewas the experienceof something supplemental added to reality.That thiswas coherentlyexperienced and actively configuredin thephotography made with thesupplementary instrument accounts for the incrediblecoherence of European photographyof this period-not, as is sometimessuggested, its diffractioninto differentsects. But it is my thesis that what the surrealistsin particular added to that realitywas the vision of it as representationor sign. Reality was both extendedand replaced or supplanted by that mastersupplement which is writing:the paradoxical writingof the photograph.

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