Surrealism’s Polymorphous Afterlives, by Chitra Ganesh, Brooklyn Rail October 2024
1.
A woman and her companion, a tree-human hybrid, walk hand in hand under the moonlight on a stone path that zigzags across lush valleys. Their backdrop is a landscape of ancient cities situated on a horizon, up the hill from a mountain with six limbs who sits in cross-legged meditation. The text bubbles contain impressions of seasonal rhythms recorded on long winter walks, and imagined memories of who or what we were before humanity came to exist. Here and throughout my practice, I gravitate towards dissonant pairings of image and text to cultivate multiple storylines and temporalities within a singular frame. Memories of previous lives become the thoughts of trees and the speech of shadows.
Reflecting on Surrealism’s legacies, perhaps its greatest gift to my creative process has been automatic writing. I experience automatic writing, an act of bringing pen to paper to summon stream-of-consciousness thought, as a process akin to drawing-with-language, activating a current that runs directly between hand and brain to capture an unmediated flow of information. Writing this way has animated a vital poetic register in my work that adds depth and texture to how I approach storytelling. Text fragments from a playful, open-ended writing process combine with images to form more expansive, polyvocal narratives. Automatic writing also upends and invigorates the comic form’s conventional syntax, which tends to favor a more descriptive relationship between pictures and words.
The worlds in my work evoke “the central mechanism of Surrealism’s theory of poetry: the experience of ‘disorientation,’ engendered by what Breton called ‘the marvelous ability to reach out, without leaving the field of our experience, to two distinct realities, and bring them together to create a spark.” This spark presents as a juxtaposition or coalescing of distinct realities, what we might refer to as the multiverse today. Surrealism resonates with other key paradigms that structure my thinking: the archetypes of myth, Afro- and Desi- futurisms, magical realism, and speculative fiction.
2.
Fragments of a femme body hover in outer space, composed of a face, single arm, skeletal antennae, and hanging flowers. A portal formed by a rip in the time-space fabric of her skin replaces her right eye; a third eye revealing a cosmos beyond. To her left floats a planet with a finger tracing the vagus nerve’s pathways extending from the kidneys to the lizard brain.
My iconography draws from a vast visual grammar developed by artists who were women working with/in the Surrealist movement. Their pioneering work carved out a space for figuration that transgressed binary sexual difference and decentered the male gaze, strategies that, to return to “continue to reverberate within contemporary practices … that articulate how the body is marked by femininity as a lived experience, subjectivity produced through new narratives, and the possibility of a feminine imaginary enacted.”
A robust lexicon of symbols threads through this oeuvre of paintings, photography, experimental writing, drawing, and performance. It includes proliferating eyes, portals, and hybrid/chimera/superhuman forms that draw upon dream logics and subterranean desire. In this process, as in my work, the body is activated as a site and source of disruption. It is dismembered, doubled, multiplied and rearranged to reflect a more nuanced female subjectivity that exceeds its physical boundaries, and operates as an agent of transformation in its own right. Bodily rupture and hybridity dovetail with my ongoing interrogation of received Hindu and Buddhist iconographies, which also underscore plurality and transformation via multiple eyes and limbs, and fragmented figures in which the distinction between interior and exterior dissolve. These ideas are embodied in “exquisite corpse,” a collective drawing exercise and a blueprint of sorts for queer figuration. Playing the game as a teenager in the summer of my coming out catalyzed both an artistic and queer awakening. Surrealism’s portals take the form of eyes, windows, mirrors, tunnels, and holes. In my work, portals serve as a bridge to non-linear temporality, traversing wide swaths of spacetime, and collapsing the distance between deep pasts and far futures. They are a conceptual emergency exit and hold the potential for political imagination that surpasses our current moment marked by rapidly narrowing discourse, polarization, and the spread of disinformation.
2024 could not be a better time to reflect on Surrealism’s political and antifascist underpinnings. The movement’s core commitment to multiplicity gives it a protean nature and global reach. Notions of rupture and freedom—abstractly articulated in the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto—crystallized and took root in feminist, queer, and anticolonial work, as witnessed in the art of Lenore Fini, Unica Zürn, Remedios Varo, Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun, and informed theories of Négritude in the revolutionary writings of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. These intersections have been vital to my work. Our current moment bears witness to a global authoritarian turn, with struggles for liberation unfolding in Palestine, Bangladesh, and Sudan—‚among other countries—resisting extractive capitalism, ethnic cleansing, and the suppression of dissent. One hundred years on, Surrealism’s legacies of rendering the familiar not only strange but untenable, and disrupting business as usual, are more urgently required than ever.