Rose-Anne Gush
Surrealism from a Global Perspective

‘When men [sic] die, they enter into history. When statues die, they enter art’. On the political aesthetics of anti-colonial and anti-fascist surrealism.’[1]

Rose-Anne Gush’s lecture will examine the political aesthetics of Surrealism and its often anti-colonial and anti-fascist tendencies through a study of artistic practices in Belgrade, Paris and Martinique between the 1920s and 1960s. It scrutinizes how Surrealist works – from Chris Marker’s and Alain Resnais’ film Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953, Statues Die Too) to lesser-known anti-colonial and anti-fascist archives materialize the violent unevenness and crises of capitalist modernity. Situating these works against the cataclysmic backdrop of global war, mass displacement, famine, racialized persecution, forces that redrew borders and imperial collapse, decolonization, the emergence of new nation-states and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Dr. Rose-Anne Gush will argue that Surrealism’s radical formalism embodies the temporalities and dialectics of combined and uneven development.

Gush will demonstrate how Surrealism was able to shift the temporality of modernity, arguing that the Second World War, in which the former Yugoslavia was also involved, should not be regarded as less modern than Surrealist hubs like Paris, a city historically considered the epicenter of modernity conceived as the very center of modernity. As such, she questions the self-image of both Surrealism, arguing that it was in fact a transnational movement, thereby also challenging modernism.

By focusing on the location of artists, transnational networks, and institutions (including museums as sites of colonial power and ambivalence), the lecture reframes 20th century art history through a materialist lens, proposing a methodology that understands art as both a symptom and an actor within the struggles of the first half to the middle of the 20th century that emerge from the dualism of center and periphery. In doing so, she demonstrates that the so-called centers of modernism, like Paris, are generally overrepresented in the art historical canon, while the periphery is often overlooked. This blind spot will be examined closely: Through a close analysis of buttom-up aesthetic strategies, Gush shows how surrealist practices destabilized the spatial logic of empire, nation and their borders, while opening up emancipatory horizons.

[1] Chris Marker & Lauren Ashby, ​‘The Statues Also Die’, in Art in Translation, 5:4 (2013), p. 431.