Constituting Surrealism (original) (raw)
This paper will engage with the significance of the trial in Surrealist literature. It will begin by describing how the surrealist group constituted itself through the Dada trial of Maurice Barrès in 1922 – which negated Dada’s ‘absolute’ negation and differentiated the proto-surrealists from the rest of the Dada movement. The rest of the paper will look at how the surrealists redeployed the concept of the trial as method of critiquing perceived reality. From the outset surrealist literature is littered with references to trials. For instance in the early 1920’s they wrote about holding assizes to establish who was guilty of betraying the avant-garde principles of Dada and Surrealism, in 1934 they tried Dali for crimes against surrealism and throughout the 1920’s and ‘30’s they simulated madness in order to try reality. They believed that through their critique, their constant trial of reality, they could overcome the common- sense perception of the world and create the conditions for a radical new form of consciousness.
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