179

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF SURREALISM

IN LATE-TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHILEAN POETRY
MATAS AYALA
Surrealism in Latin America had an enormous infuence on literature during
the frst half of the twentieth century, as evidenced by the many tributes and
publications from Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Argentina dedicated to the move-
ment.' Moreover, it is well known that concepts such as lo real maravilloso and
magical realism can be traced to the treatment of the uncanny and the fantastic
in surrealism. However, in the second half of the century, surrealist infuence in
Latin America was diluted by the general impact of the avant-garde. For exam-
ple, many avant-garde motifs and proceduressuch as chance, automatism,
and montagethat in Latin America appeared to be an infuence of surreal-
ism were likewise employed by Dadaism in diferent contexts and with difer-
ent results. Besides a handful of authors that clearly belong to the surrealist
hinterland, which persists today, the most important Latin American literary
movements (estridentismo [stridentism], ultrasmo [ultraism], creacionismo
[creationism]) and magazines (Martn Fierro, Amauta) did not adhere to the
tenets of surrealism.
Surrealism is, then, paradoxically confronted with its inadaptability in a
pure form. As the critic Valentn Fernidn states in a polemic article, surreal-
ism infuenced the most important poets of the Latin American avant-garde
(Oliverio Girondo, Pablo Neruda, Csar Vallejo), but none of them strictly
identifed themselves as surrealists. In Latin America, European surrealism
took on a new form, one mixed with romantic subjectivity, political programs,
and the discourse of trans-culturalism, as with the novelist Alejo Carpentiers
concept of lo real maravilloso. Taken as a whole, the poetry of Octavio Paz, the
foremost promoter of surrealism afer World War II, can at best be character-
ized as quasi-surrealist. Tere are books by Paz that are more clearly associated
with surrealism, such as guila o sol? (:,:; Eagle or Sun?, :,o), but his work
seems today to be an owl of Minerva fying at dusk, as his insistence on the
importance of this movement for twentieth-century literature is more in recog-
nition of its legacy than its validity as a future program for avant-garde poetics.
In the following pages, I will problematize some of this diluted surrealist
legacy by discussing three Chilean poets who emerged during the :,os and
:8os: Juan Luis Martnez (::,), Ral Zurita (b. :,o), and Claudio Bertoni
180
AYALA
(b. :o). None of them identifed himself as a surrealist, but all of them have
recognized the infuence of surrealism on their production. Although diver-
gent in their respective aesthetic projects, these poets all incorporated photog-
raphya medium that became an important documentary tool in a troubled
Chile during the :,os and :8osinto their literary works to create layers of
meaning and additional complexity, revealing the infuence of surrealist tech-
niques. Te relationship between surrealism and photography has been studied
from several viewpoints: photographys interaction with text in magazines and
books, photography as the unconscious of surrealism,` and the use of photog-
raphy to explore a variety of themes such as the city, desire, and orientalism.
I will show how these poets used photography to renew some classic surrealist
motifs, including the use of text and image as a conceptual enigma in the works
of Martnez, dream and fantasy as the occasion for redemption in Zurita, and
the city as a space of aleatory encounters in Bertoni.
Photography and the Marvelous in Juan Luis Martnezs La nueva novella
Juan Luis Martnezs La nueva novela (:,,; Te new novel) is both a hermetic
and a playful work. Tis is apparent from the cover of the book, where, in place
of the traditional name of the author, two names are crossed out (fg. :). Te
surrealist infuence is manifest in the books combination of estrangement and
humor, nonsense and play, and the uncanny and ludic. Indeed, Martnezs work
pushes the bounds of a traditional book of poetry. Te work can be justifably
characterized as an art book due to the consistent design,

which features the
repetition of diferent book elementsfor example, title, epigraph, numbered
parts, and footnotes. Te actual text, most of which is prose, is minimal and
eccentric. Much of La nueva novela comprises pastiches of citations, intertex-
tual references, images, and collages.
Te images in Martnezs work ofen move beyond a supplemental and dec-
orative function to become the centerpiece. Tese images have diverse prov-
enance: some are drawings by the author, others are photographs from books
and magazines, advertisements, and even reproductions of high art. More
important than the origin of these images is how the juxtaposition of text and
image creates multiple associations through repetition, doubling, cropping, and
collage. Allusion and fragmentation are brought to the fore, sacrifcing seman-
tic clarity. Martnez makes numerous direct references to Dadaist and surreal-
ist authors as he employs avant-garde practices such as the clear opposition
to realism, the negation of conventional notions of genre, and the rejection of
tradition as a source of authority. Just as with the classic works of European
surrealism, La nueva novela plays with the idea of the book and refects upon
Fig. 1.
Cover of Juan Luis Martnez,
La nueva novela (Santiago:
Ediciones Archivo, 1985).
181
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF SURREALISM
182
AYALA
language and extralinguistic codes, the transmission of knowledge, and the
ofen thin line between nonsense and meaning.
Te text El revlver de cabellos blancos (Te revolver with white hair)'
takes its title from a book of poetry by Andr Breton and reproduces an image,
inverted at a o-degree angle, of the white-haired French poet smoking a
pipe (fg. :). Te epigraph of Martnezs text is by the French writer Maurice
Blanchot: Ruptura, carencia, hueco, he aqu la trama de lo textual (lo de den-
tro, lo de fuera, el tejido capilar) (Rupture, absence, emptiness, here the text
is woven [what is lef in, what is lef out, the capillary tissue]). Te text atop
the upper part of the imagefragmented, cropped, and pasted like a paper
collagerewrites the epigraph, shifing the content from the textual realm
to reality:
Ruptura, carencia, hueco, he ah la trama de lo real: (la vida, la muerte: lo
de dentro, lo de fuera): la cabeza disparando desde la pgina(la fjacin
de la escritura)hacia el vaco que la bordea,(el retardo de la lectura)
destruyendo objetivamente la subjetividad: lo no textual. La fotografa y el
texto: la horizontal, la vertical: la forma de una pistola. (Rupture, absence,
emptiness, here reality is woven: (life, death: what is lef in, what is lef
out): the head taking of from the page[the fxation of writing]into the
emptiness that surrounds it,[the delay of reading]objectively destroy-
ing subjectivity: the nontextual. Te photograph and the text: the horizon-
tal, the vertical: the shape of a gun.)
Te collage itself has the schematic shape of a gun: the vertical text under
the image can be seen as the grip and the horizontal photograph as the barrel.
For this reason, the text at the bottom right of the image announces: El percu-
tor ya golpeado y el gatillo humeante como una pipa (Te hammer and trigger
beaten and smoking like a pipe). If the shape of the text and the image makes
a gun, Bretons pipe is the trigger and his head is the barrel. Te text below the
image, adopting a scientifc or technical discourse, gives a convincing expla-
nation of how hair turns gray.
Te title of Bretons book Le rvolver cheveux blancs (:,:; Te revolver
with white hair) refers to a typically surreal image, one that is playfully materi-
alized through Martnezs collage in a manner reminiscent of Dada. Martnez
defetishizes the image of the founder of surrealism, frst by changing its orienta-
tion from horizontal to vertical and then by spacing the relationship between
text and image. As critic Rosalind Krauss states with regard to Dadaist col-
lage, the white space between the letters and the image reamrms their separa-
tion, their formal exclusion, and their rearticulation and reinterpretation on
Fig. 2.
Page from Juan Luis Martnez,
La nueva novela (Santiago:
Ediciones Archivo, 1985),
60, featuring a collage by
Martnez.
183
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF SURREALISM
184
AYALA
the page." In any event, Martnezs image-poem can be interpreted as both a
homage to Breton as well as a critical intervention. As Dawn Ades notes about
Max Ernst collages, this articulation of the comical and the marvelous is one
of the prominent features of surrealism.' By means of the juxtaposition of text
and image, sense and nonsense, the literary and the scientifc, La nueva novela
embodies the spirit of surrealism.
Martnezs work presents an extended parody of reasoning in which form
and syntax foreground the efect or sensation of truth while denying any
clear meaning. In a seminal essay, the poets Enrique Lihn and Pedro Lastra
state that in La nueva novela, the language makes fragile its criteria of truth
and reality.'" Surrealism as well as nonsense and absurdist literature (both the
works of Lewis Carroll and his photographs of Alice Liddell appear in La nueva
novela) are the antecedents of this procedure. Martnez multiplies the semi-
otic practices (photography, quotes, collages), which, instead of fxing meaning,
trigger unusual and marvelous permutations. La nueva novela hints at the infu-
ence of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, given its use of humor and its
conception of writing as a form of reading and quoting. But from a visual point
of view, Rosalind Krausss statement with regard to the French writer Georges
Bataille comes to mind: a production of images that do not decorate, but rather
structure the basic mechanisms of thought.''
As the Chilean critic Valeria de los Ros proposes, photography is a key
to reading La nueva novela, frst and foremost in its use of the positive/nega-
tive doubling of images and collages.' Building on the ideas of scholar Reese
Jenkins, de los Ros argues that Martnez employs photography to actualize the
cultural oppositions between science and art, positivism and romanticism that
emerged at the invention of photography in the nineteenth century.'` From
these observations, we can likewise conclude that La nueva novela tries to solve
the contradiction between these procedures by means of the surrealist marvel-
ous, which confates the real and the imaginary, the quotidian and the fantastic.
Ral Zuritas Purgatorio: Te Fragmented Self and Collective Fantasy
Troughout the :8os, Ral Zuritas Purgatorio (:,) became one of Chiles
most highly regarded literary works. Te book stands out at frst glance: the
front cover presents a close-up photograph of an unidentifable body part, per-
haps an opening in the skin, an eye and brow, a beard, the female pudenda, or
some uncanny hybrid of these (fg. ,). In an interview conducted at the time
of the books publication, the author stated that the photograph portrays the
scar of a self-inficted wound. Interestingly, Zuritas act of violence was neither
fully improvised nor well planned, neither a public performance (there were no
185
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF SURREALISM
Fig. 3.
Front and back cover of Ral
Zurita, Purgatorio (Santiago:
Editorial Universitaria, 1979),
featuring a photograph by
Zurita.
cameras recording the event itself) nor truly private (a photograph taken later,
of the scar, appears on a book cover). Zurita described the event this way: It
was absolutely conscious and premeditated . . . I locked myself in the bathroom,
I put an iron in the fames of the hot water heater until it was red and I put it
to my lef cheek. Afer thatI dont know why, and maybe a psychiatrist could
explain it wellI felt that that action reunited me a little. I was in a state of total
dissociation. Afer a while I realized that if I were to write something, it had to
start from this.' Te same image appears on the back cover, with the accom-
panying text: Ahora Zurita / que rapado y quemado / te hace el arte // Santiago
de Chile / :,. (Now Zurita / shaved and burned / art makes you // Santiago
de Chile / :,.)
Here, we have a series of elements that are further developed in Zuritas
work. On the one hand, there is the literary construction of a subject in a state
of psychic fragmentation. Te self-inficted wound could be a way to over-
come this fragmentation through painful bodily presence. If the cut on the skin
is to be understood as a form of writing, it is marked through presence. In
the same fashion, the photograph of the scar functions as a testimony of that
186
AYALA
presence. On the other hand, the act of cutting, the wound, and the photo-
graph are supplemented twice with texts: frst, the interviewexcluded from
Purgatorio yet an important key to its interpretationand then the text on
the back cover. Both resignify the psychic sufering and the wound in terms
of art and writing. In this way, Zurita tries to blur the boundaries between
art and life, the body and text, and the subject and the Others gaze. Te rest
of the photographs in the book exhibit this same quality: they have an indexi-
cal function (in Charles Sanders Peirces terms) but are supplemented with a
text. For example, a spread at the beginning of the volume shows a low-quality
reproduction of the authors face that resembles a photocopy of an ID photo,
but on the opposite page (fg. ), the text reads: Me llamo Raquel estoy en
el ofcio desde hace varios aos. Me encuentro en la mitad de mi vida. Perd
el camino. (My name is Rachel. Ive been on the job for some years now.
Im halfway through my life and Ive lost my way.)' Tis text repurposes the
photograph from its testimonial function: although the subject of the image
Fig. 4.
Pages from Ral Zurita,
Purgatorio (Santiago: Editorial
Universitaria, 1979), 1213.
187
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF SURREALISM
is the author, the text is in the frst-person singular and indicates a diferent
name and gender (Rachel) from that of the author (Ral Zurita). Te text here
also makes an allusion to the famous frst tercet of Dantes Divine Comedy:
Midway in the journey of our life / I came to myself in a dark wood, / for the
straight way was lost.'
As is evident from the title of Zuritas book, Dantes work is the primary
intertextual link to Purgatorio, both as a narrative of ascension and as a source
of Catholic fgures and motifs. At the bottom of this spread of Purgatorio, we
read in Latin, Ego sum qui sum (I am who I am), a tautological quotation
from the Bible (Exodus ,::) in which God declares the certainty of his exis-
tence and his power. Te line appears in a diferent font from the rest of the text
and is perfectly divided across the pages. Te image of the author and the two
texts combine a fragmentation of the self and the fantasy of a godlike certainty
an excessive certainty acquired only through the text.
Te photographic representation of the authors wound implies an intersub-
jective gaze. In readings that aim to historicize Zuritas work, this articulation
of a collapsed subjectivity is related to the repressed collective subject of the
nation of Chile under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which
lasted from :,, to :8. In Margins and Institutions, Nelly Richard asserts that,
during this time in Chile, performance artists used the body to articulate the
private and public spheres of life. Zurita used bodily pain in particular as the
element of suture between the subjective and the collective.'' Pain, conceived as
the traumatic presence of the body, connects the identifcation of the artist with
collective sufering. As Richard states, Self-punishment merges with an us in
that it is both redeemer and redeemed in a tradition of communal sacrifce, or
the ritual exorcism of violence.'"
Another way of relating the subject and society is through the fantasy and
collective redemption of poetic text, as exemplifed by the numerous images
of the Chilean landscape in Zuritas work. In these images, the reader is con-
fronted with what the critic Walter Benjamin, referring to surrealist practices,
termed the profane illumination of the poetic image based on material.'' In
Purgatorio, diferent spaces interact: on one side are the virtual spaces of math-
ematics, text, and dreams; on the other, the real spaces of Chilean geography
and the printed page. Trough Zuritas text, various topologiesthe psychic,
the collective, the geographic, and the politicalcollapse in on one another. In
this new topology, dreams and reality communicate, the marvelous turns real,
life and work coincide, and language and context resignify each other. Tis is
exemplifed in Para Atacama del desierto (For Atacama of the Desert), named
for a ooo-mile strip of land located in the north of Chile that is said to be the
driest desert in the world:
188
AYALA
For Atacama of the Desert
i. Let us look then at the Atacama Desert
ii. Let us look at our loneliness in the desert.
So that desolate before these shadows the landscape becomes a cross
stretched out over Chile and the loneliness of my shadow then sees the
redeeming of the other shadows: My own Redemption in the Desert.
iii. Who would then credit the redeeming of my shadow
iv. Who would speak of the deserts loneliness
So that my shadow begins to touch your shadow and your shadow that
other shadow and so on until all Chile is just one shadow with open arms:
one long shadow crowned with thorns
v. Ten the Cross will be merely my shadow opening its arms
vi. We will then be the Deserts Crown of Torns
vii. Ten nailed shadow to shadow like a Cross stretched out over Chile we
will have seen forever the Solitary Expiring of the Atacama Desert. "
In this section of poems about the Atacama Desertas in the section reas
verdes (Green areas) of Purgatorio, where a Cartesian space overlaps with the
pastoral landscape of cows out to pasture, creating a sort of virtual realitythe
poet places a new or illusory reality of delirium or messianic delusion upon the
image of the desert. Here, imagination and reality merge and the text occupies
the locus of the unconscious in a gesture reminiscent of Bretons surrealism but
with the added space for collective redemption.
Claudio Bertoni and the Desire of Everyday Life
Claudio Bertoni is a poet, photographer, and visual artist who has succeeded
in incorporating these diferent media into coherent works. Among Chilean
poets, Bertoni has won a unique and numerous following as a former hippie,
a Buddhism specialist, and a connoisseur of soul and jazz music. In his
ofen transparently autobiographical poetry, Bertoni refers to himself in a
189
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF SURREALISM
self-deprecating manner refecting everyday speech. His writing resembles a
diary, wherein he registers feeting thoughts and details of his private life, with
its many contretemps, regardless of how dull, absurd, silly, or bizarre they may
seem. Elements of mass culture, such as his favorite musical genres and TV
programs, are mixed with traditionally serious subjects such as God, illness,
death, and loneliness.
From the start, sex and desire have been important themes of Bertonis work,
particularly the fugitive desire and sexual attraction caused by aleatory encoun-
ters in the city. As Benjamin observes, in analyzing the French poet Charles
Baudelaire, Te delight of the city dweller is not so much love at frst sight as
love at last sight.' In the shocking moment of the visual encounter, the urban
dweller falls in love with someone he is never going to see again. Te fneur,
who relishes in the anonymity of the chance encounter, fnds an answer to his
desires in the city. Taken up by the surrealists, this motif was labeled objective
chance and has an important place in poet Louis Aragons Le paysan de Paris
(::o; Te Paris Peasant, :) and Bretons Nadja (::8), in which an enigmatic
anxiety is perceived in the people and objects found in the city. Bertoni takes
the Baudelairian and surrealist principle of the masculine gaze to its mundane
extremes. He looks for and fnds attractive women everywhere in the city: on
sidewalks and buses, in queues, cafs, and shops (fg. ,). Te urban space is
organized through women as well as time. Bertoni embodies the anxiety of
male desire in the modern city.
Te famous line by Pablo Neruda, Love is so short; forgetting, so long,
from Poema :o, was rewritten by Bertoni in a short poem titled Una vez
ms (Once more), which reads, Te miniskirt is so short; forgetting, so long.
Te sublimity of love and the complexity of mourning the object of desire are
reduced to the shock that the miniskirtand the fragmented female body
provokes in the poetic subject. Te miniskirt is an object of desire as wellnot
as something lost, but rather as an anonymous, ephemeral object that was never
possessed in the frst place. Te diferences between Neruda and Bertoni lie in
their tone (the former solemn and the latter playful) and their positioning of
the poetic subject. In Veinte poemas de amor y una cancin desesperada (::;
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, :o), Neruda embodies the romantic
subject prior to his avant-garde period, while in Una vez ms, Bertoni uses
humor: he references a common urban experience in which daily life is sud-
denly disrupted by the sight of an anonymous and attractive woman.
One remarkable feature of Bertonis poetry is its metonymic articulation
a predominant trope in his writingthrough which chance and desire inter-
sect in the urban landscape. Te poetic persona does not have to possess the
object of desire but only pass close enough to obtain a certain satisfaction. For
190
AYALA
example, in the text Algo es algo, (Somethings better than nothing), Bertoni
writes, I take a bus / and I see a woman / who will never be mine // I sit behind
her / and her hair caresses / my fngers.` Desire is fulflled, or at least subli-
mated, by an accidental, unconscious, and light caress of the womans haira
fragment of her body, fitting across the fngers of the poetic subject. Many of
Bertonis poems are so short that they could have been jotted down at the same
spot were the experiences took place, as a literary snapshot of the moment. Te
model for this writing is not only the diary but also photography.
Photographs of women caught in the street by chance supplement many of
Bertonis poems. A collection of these photographs taken in the :,os and :8os
was published recently in the book Chilenas (:oo). As a veteran street pho-
tographer, Bertoni carries his camera hanging around his neck, and when the
occasion arises, he has to point and shoot the photograph in an instant. Ofen
speed is more important than perfect composition in registering the passing
subject. Some of these photos exhibit an awkward framing, and the position of
the photographer does not always seem to occupy the most privileged point of
view (fgs. ,,).
Te act of taking a picture is ofen homologous to a violent act of possession,
in which the camera takes the place of a weapon or phallus. To photograph
Fig. 5.
Claudio Bertoni (Chilean,
b.1946).
Photograph from Claudio
Bertoni, Chilenas (Santiago:
Ocho Libros, 2009), 79.
Fig. 6.
Claudio Bertoni (Chilean,
b.1946).
Photograph from Claudio
Bertoni, Chilenas (Santiago:
Ocho Libros, 2009), 78.
Fig. 7.
Claudio Bertoni (Chilean,
b.1946).
Photograph from Claudio
Bertoni, Chilenas (Santiago:
Ocho Libros, 2009), 80.
191
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF SURREALISM
attractive women in the street without their consent could be considered an
act of crass male aggression. In spite of the masculine impulse underlying his
project, Bertoni was a shy photographer; sometimes he did not even dare to
look through the viewfnder to focus and frame. Ofen, he seems to have taken
the picture without raising the camera up to eye level; the camera remained on
his chest while he shot the photograph, one could say, from the heart. Tese
pictures are not completely conscious in their focus and framing, and thus the
chance encounter in the city is reinforced by a chance snapshot that questions
the power of the male gaze.
It seems that blurred, unbalanced, and unfocused compositions enact the
transgressive form of desire itself: blind and undiscerning, brief in its explosion
but inexhaustible. Nevertheless, these unconscious, or half-conscious, snap-
shots are not violent in their representation of the fneurs surprise encounter
with desire in the urban landscape. Essentially, the instability of composition in
these snapshots undoes the violence of the masculine gaze by highlighting the
male subjects lack of intervention or agency. In this way, Bertoni reinterprets
surrealist automatism by inscribing desire in the work of art without making it a
romantic fetish. While avoiding the the creation of suggestive imagery through
the operations of chance, he remains close to the surrealist movement by
192
AYALA
recording feeting desire. In Bertonis work, both poetry and photographs are
elements of a project based on chance encounters with the objects of desire.
Bertoni recognizes this desire as a lack, and its literary and visual representation
is likewise always marked by absence.
Martnez, Zurita, and Bertoni use photography, an essentially technical
medium, to complement the romantic aspects of literary surrealism that ide-
alize the Other and that ofer synthesis among diferent elements. Martnezs
literary and visual games combine science and poetry, or knowledge and non-
senseopening marvelous and humorous interstices in the prosaic. In Zurita,
photographs with a referential function that combine life and art resignify the
psychic pain of the poets identity in crisis. Similarly, the geographical space
of fantasy provides the locus of collective redemption. Finally, in Bertoni, the
desire of the city dweller is set free through photography and poetry. Te male
gaze fnds diferent ways to compensate its desire, either by a metonymic pres-
ence or a sudden snapshot. Martnez, Zurita, and Bertoni, through the media-
tion of photography, open the literary to visuality, creating unclassifable works,
and in this way, revitalizing the legacy of surrealism in the Chilean neo-avant-
garde poetry of the seventies and eighties.
Notes
Tis article is part of the research project Fondecyt number :::oo:o, supported
by CONICYT, Chile. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.
:. Troughout Latin America, a handful of literary and artistic journals were devel-
oped as a way to experiment at a formal level, to criticize the cultural feld, and to
modernize through both the incorporation and reconfguration of metropolitan
procedures and techniques. Among others magazines, it is necessary to mention
Martn Fierro (Buenos Aires, :::,), Amauta (Lima, ::o,:), Contemporneos
(Mexico, ::8,:), Revista de avance (Havana, ::,,o), Mandrgora (Santiago,
:,8,).
:. Dawn Ades, Photography and the Surrealist Text, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane
Livingston, eds., LAmour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, D.C.:
Corcoran Galley of Art, :8,), :,,8.
,. Rosalind Krauss, Te Photographic Conditions of Surrealism, in idem, Te
Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT
Press, :8o), 8,::8.
. Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography
in Interwar Paris (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, :oo:).
,. David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social
Dissent (London: I.B. Taurus, :oo).
o. Juan Luis Martnez, La nueva novela (Santiago: Editiones Archivo, :,,).
193
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF SURREALISM
,. Martnez, La nueva novela, oo.
8. Krauss, Photographic Conditions, :oo,.
. Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Tames & Hudson, :8), ::o.
:o. Enrique Lihn and Pedro Lastra, Seales de ruta de Juan Luis Martnez (Santiago:
Ediciones Archivo, :8,), :o.
::. Rosalind Krauss, Corpus Delicti, October ,, (:8,): ,:,:, ,,.
::. Valeria de los Ros, La fotografa como clave de lectura de La nueva novela,
Estudios flolgicos (:oo): ,o.
:,. De los Ros, Fotografa, ,,.
:. Ral Zurita, Ral Zurita: Abrir los ojos, mirar hacia el cielo, in Juan Andrs
Pia, Conversaciones con la poesa Chilena: Nicanor Parra, Eduardo Anguita,
Gonzalo Rojas, Enrique Lihn, Oscar Hahn, Ral Zurita (Santiago: Pehun, :o),
:,:,,, :o.
:,. Ral Zurita, Purgatorio (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, :,), :::,. Ral
Zurita, Purgatorio, :,o:,,, trans. Jeremy Jacobson (Pittsburgh: Latin American
Literary Review Press, :8,), ::.
:o. Tis translation by Robert Hollander of Dantes La divina commedia (ca. :,o8::)
is taken from the Princeton Dante Project, http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/
(:o May :o:o). Te Divine Comedy is divided into three major sections: Inferno,
Purgatory, and Paradise.
:,. Nelly Richard, Margins and Institutions (Melbourne: Art & Text, :8o), o,.
:8. Richard, Margins and Institutions, oo, o8
:. Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: Te Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,
in Selected Writings, vol. :, ::,:, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans.
Rodney Livinstones et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, :), ::,.
:o. Zurita, Purgatorio, :,o:,,, o:.
::. Walter Benjamin, Te Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, in idem,
Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, vol. , :8:o, trans. Edmund
Jephcott et al., ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap, :oo:), :,.
::. Claudio Bertoni, Jvenes buenas mozas (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, :oo:), ,o.
:,. Bertoni, Jvenes buenas mozas, :.
:. Claudio Bertoni, Chilenas (Santiago: Ocho Libros, :oo).
:,. Krauss, Corpus Delicti, ,.
Getty Research Institute
Issues & Debates
Edited by DAWN ADES, RITA EDER, and GRACIELA SPERANZA
SURREALISM IN
LATIN AMERICA
VIVSIMO MUERTO
THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS PROGRAM
Tomas W. Ga ehtgens, Director, Getty Research Institute
Gail Feigenbaum, Associate Director
:o:o J. Paul Getty Trust
Published by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
Getty Publications
::oo Getty Center Drive, Suite ,oo
Los Angeles, CA oo-:o8:
www.getty.edu/publications
Tobi Kaplan, Lauren Edson, John Hicks, and Laura Santiago, Manuscript Editors
Tobi Kaplan, Production Editor
Catherine Lorenz, Designer
Amita Molloy, Production Coordinator
Diane Franco, Typesetter
Stuart Smith, Series Designer
Type composed in Minion and Trade Gothic
Printed in TK through TK
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[TK]
Front cover: [caption TK]
Back cover: [caption TK]
Frontispiece: Francis Als (Belgian, b. :,), Hopscotch (Rayuela), :o:o, preparatory sketch for an intervention
in the exhibition Domin canbal (PAC MURCIA, :o:o), Sala Vernicas, Murcia, Spain.
Tis volume evolved from Vivsimo Muerto: Debates on Surrealism in Latin America, a symposium held at
the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, :,:o June :o:o.
[Frontispiece]
Francis Als (Belgian,
b.1959). Hopscotch
(Rayuela), 2010, preparatory
sketch for an intervention in
the exhibition Domin canbal
(PAC MURCIA, 2010), Sala
Vernicas, Murcia, Spain.
Collection of the artist.
vi Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
DAWN ADES, RITA EDER, AND GRACIELA SPERANZA
Part One. Surrealist Love Letters:
The Art and Poetry of Csar Moro
00 We Who Have neither Church nor Country:
Csar Moro and Surrealism
DAWN ADES
00 Semiotics of the Body and the Passions in
Csar Moros Love Letters and Poems
YOLANDA WESTPHALEN
00 Making the Stone Speak: Csar Moro and the Object
KENT DICKSON
Part Two. Surrealist Encounters in the New World:
Pre-Columbian and Northwest Coast Art
00 Benjamin Pret and Paul Westheim:
Surrealism and Other Genealogies in the Land of the Aztecs
RITA EDER
00 Anthropology in the Journals Dyn and El hijo prdigo:
A Comparative Analysis of Surrealist Inspiration
DANIEL GARZA USABIAGA
00 Wolfgang Paalen: Te Totem as Sphinx
ANDREAS NEUFERT
Part Three. Revisiting the Surrealism Revolution:
Ideology and Action
000 Andr Bretons Anthology of Freedom:
Te Contagious Power of Revolt
MARIA CLARA BERNAL
000 My Goddesses and My Monsters:
Maria Martins and Surrealism in the s
TERRI GEIS
CONTENTS
vi
Part Four. The Surrealism Effect: Legacies and Reception
in Art, Literature, and Politics
000 A Note Concerning Causality: Julio Cortzar and Surrealism
GAVIN PARKINSON
000 Te Photographic Legacy of Surrealism in
Late-Twentieth-Century Chilean Poetry
MATAS AYALA
000 Wanderers: Surrealism and Contemporary Latin American Art
and Fiction
GRACIELA SPERANZA
000 Biographical Notes on Contributors
00 Illustration Credits
000 Index