Inside/Outside: Surrealism in the Time of COVID

Inside/OutsideSurrealism in the Time of COVID Kate Conley (bio) and Alyce Mahon (bio) The topic for the second issue of the International Journal of Surrealism arose when the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) was still impacting life globally and companionship was only afforded by faces and voices captured on a screen. The intrusion of an infectious disease on everyday life had historical and thematic resonance for our studies in Surrealism: it renewed interest in the influenza pandemic of 1918, one hundred years earlier, and it led to a sense of creative urgency. Writers, artists, and intellectuals turned newly to the sur-real and the depths of the psyche and scholars reflected on the ways in which art could magnify and alleviate widespread fear, loss, and isolation. This issue aims to look back and forward across these two historical moments, roughly one hundred years apart, and to consider how the surreal became the most effective discourse to respond to the alarmingly real situation of life under a pandemic. Both pandemics tapered off in a time when political tensions were high—surrounding questions of equal representation in a democracy, such as whether women should have the right to vote, and, more recently, whether citizens historically in the minority have gained sufficient access to the rights afforded those in the majority. End Page vii Before formally launching Surrealism as a collective in 1924, André Breton and Philippe Soupault turned to automatism to unlock the psyche for creative ends, promoting its practice in their proto-surrealist journal Littérature (1919-24). The first edition opened with an excerpt from André Gide's Les Nouvelles Nourritures (fragments du 1er et du Ve livres), and the assertion that "man is born for happiness" (Que l'homme est né pour le bonheur, Certe toute la nature l'enseigne). Society's happiness had been brutally blunted by war, but Surrealism aspired to enflame it, in radically new ways. One hundred years later, Stephen Robeson-Miller crafted a surrealist work out of garbage, turning discarded painted paper into a surface for an abstracted face in ink and gouache that he titled Lingua Franca (2020). A detail of the work adorns the cover: an outlined eye that emerges out of the dark. It reminds us that the senses are our lingua franca, or common communication, even when we are forced to keep a safe distance from each other. The articles range from the analysis by Kristoffer Noheden of the late assemblages of Alan Glass as works that insist on the hospitable possibilities of creativity in an increasingly inhospitable world, to Julia Lockheart's account of DreamsID, a Dreams Project she launched with sleep scientist Mark Blagrove involving the recital of dream narratives by COVID-19 health workers. Essays by Kirsten Strom and Giorgio Di Domenico each take retrospective looks at surrealizing images. Strom argues that Luis Buñuel's films from the 1950s and 1960s, with their psychologically confining themes and focus on desire, are rendered all the more vivid by our recent experiences of confinement. Di Domenico explores how 1970s Italian interiors featured in popular magazines might be understood as "private shrines" that reveal the owners' most intimate spaces and resonate newly, again, when viewed during COVID times. Victoria Carruthers and Jaime Tsai consider COVID's magnification of the dynamic between the politics of the private and public space in their reading of the work of Eugenia Lim and James Nguyen as a form of "counter-mapping" to Sinophobia in Australia. In our Portfolio section, we include an original poem by Irish poet Tim Murphy, in which we find André Breton's End Page viii Nadja in an airport space that then morphs into a forest. We also include three automatic paintings by Stephen Robeson-Miller, created during the pandemic, which form a visual essay in which he refashions isolation and loss as dream and rebirth through boldly inked lines that refuse to be contained by the page. In an interview with Susan Aberth, also included in this volume, the artist explains Surrealism as a connection between moments and voices in time. This second issue of the IJS counters pandemic life in celebrating the mind's eye...