Full Description
In Surrealist sabotage and the war on work, art historian Abigail Susik uncovers the expansive parameters of the international surrealist movement's ongoing engagement with an aesthetics of sabotage between the 1920s and the 1970s, demonstrating how surrealists unceasingly sought to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work. In four case studies devoted to surrealism's transatlantic war on work, Susik analyses how artworks and texts by Man Ray, André Breton, Simone Breton, André Thirion, Óscar Domínguez, Konrad Klapheck, and the Chicago surrealists, among others, were pivotally impacted by the intransigent surrealist concepts of principled work refusal, permanent strike, and autonomous pleasure. Underscoring surrealism's profound relevance for readers engaged in ongoing debates about gendered labour and the wage gap, endemic over-work and exploitation, and the vicissitudes of knowledge work and the gig economy, Surrealist sabotage and the war on work reveals that surrealism's creative work refusal retains immense relevance in our wired world.
Contents
Introduction
1 Genealogy of the surrealist work refusal
2 Surrealist automatism as symbolic sabotage
Simone Breton and the gendered labour of the surrealist automatist
Tracing stenographic surrealism and the dame dactylographe
Psychic automatism and feminisation
3 Óscar Domínguez: autonomy and autoeroticism
'These phosphorescent youths': Domínguez and surrealism, 1934-35
Domínguez's Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle (1934-35)
Operating Maldoror's vamp machine
Dysfunctional tools in Domínguez's anti-work oeuvre
4 Direct action surrealism in Chicago
Prologue: activist avant-garde
'Incendiary time bomb': The Rebel Worker (1964-66)
Robert Green, Gallery Bugs Bunny, and Chicago automatism
Chicago surrealism and Herbert Marcuse contra the performance principle
Epilogue: override dysfunctions and the 'Klapheck computer'
Index
