KATE KHATIBment with aesthetics, like its involvement with theology, has been premised, more often
than not, upon the spectacular demise of art itself. In the wake of Dada, surrealism’s
engagement with art was really a question of anti-art, although the surrealists, unlike the
dadaists, carried this dialectical demise through to its complete end, making a full cycle
past the destruction of art to arrive at a point where something new—a radically new
approach to artistic production—could arise like a phoenix from the ashes. In a mono-
graph on the minimalist painter Ad Reinhardt—not a surrealist himself, but not entirely
unsympathetic to surrealist sensibilities—Susan Sontag outlines the mystical movement
between art and anti-art:
As the activity of the mystic must end in avia negativa, a theology of God’s absence,
a craving for the cloud of unknowingness beyond knowledge and for the silence
beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the ‘‘subject’’... ,
the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence.... Therefore, art
becomes estimated as something to be overthrown. A new element enters the art-
work and becomes constitutive of it: the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition,
and, ultimately of art itself.^7This description holds true for surrealism as well as for minimalism: as a critical practice,
surrealism carefully balances on this fine line between art and anti-art, or perhaps more
legitimately, between the development of anti-art as a productive strategy and the call for
the ultimate overthrow of art, whose limitations were far greater than those of the human
imagination.
Were one hard-pressed, then, to establish the fundamental structure of the confluence
of artists, authors, thinkers, and ideologues known collectively as the Surrealist Move-
ment, it would not be along the lines of a theory of aesthetics. Rather, surrealism might
best be described as a theory of experience, a critical—indeed, political—epistemology,
whose greatest goal was to develop a radically new way of experiencing the world and of
understanding the very structure of thought. From its self-acknowledged beginnings dur-
ing the dark days of the First World War to its rebirth in the heated climate of late
1960s activism in the United States—Chicago Surrealism is a direct offshoot of one of
the anarchist chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—and onward to its
involvement with the globalaltermondialisationmovement, surrealism was, and remains
today, one of the most novel attempts to clear a pathway through the underbrush of a
disenchanted world, giving rise to the possibility of a more spontaneous, joyous experi-
ence of everyday reality. What Andre ́Breton, Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard, Louis Ara-
gon, Benjamin Peret, and their fellow adventurers uncovered in their surrealist
experiments was something more than an artistic, or even rhetorical, approach to the
expression of the subconscious. Surrealism is unavowedlynotan attempt at a do-it-your-
self theory of psychoanalysis, nor does it reach outside reality to grasp at some straws of
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