Surrealism and anarchism, past and present

Last June, about fifty people gathered at the Eberhardt Press printing plant in Portland, Oregon, to meet legendary American activist Ben Morea and see a pop-up exhibition of his paintings. Morea was one of the founders of the anarchist pressure group Black Mask in New York in 1966, and also the catalyst for subsequent action groups such as Up Against the Wall Motherfucker in 1968. He was a driving force behind the closure of the Museum of Modern Art in 1966 and the occupation of the Fillmore East theater in 1968, and his uncompromising anti-capitalist and anti-racist activism set the standard for what committed radicalism could achieve in the Vietnam War era. Morea has been active as an artist since the early 1960s, and his austere paintings and satirical graphics can be found throughout the striking pages of Black Mask Zine (ten issues; New York; November 1966–May 1968).

What may not have been clear to most visitors to Morea's exhibition, however, is that Morea and Eberhardt shared not only a common anarchist perspective, but also a surrealist one. Since 2005, Charles Overbeck has been “printing for the people” at his DYI print shop in Portland, focusing particularly on publishing materials by contemporary surrealist anarchists from the United States, such as Ron Sakolsky and Penelope Rosemont. Although he was never a member of an active surrealist group, Morea always connected his painting practice and anarchist activism with surrealism, whether in the pages of Black Mask magazine or in his experimental approach to everyday life.

Why was Surrealism, a cultural and social resistance movement founded a hundred years ago, significant to someone like Morea? As he explained to me in many conversations, the Surrealists found a viable model for a social form of collectivity that attempted to unite art, anti-authoritarian resistance, mutual aid, and conscious living. Although Morea has as many critics as sympathies for Surrealism, he nevertheless considers it an important key to the puzzle of how we can live engaged lives here and now. The paintings Morea exhibited at Eberhardt Press in June were an example of this, as they had been completed using the method of automatism, a Surrealist method in which the creator seeks to detach himself from control, intention, and all the fantasies of creative genius. For Morea, the artwork is created in the moment, thus becoming the unified moment.

A few months after Morea’s exhibition at Eberhardt, there was a book launch for Ron Sakolsky’s Surrealism and the anarchist imagination at Mother Foucault's Bookshop in Portland. Sakolsky's book, published by Eberhardt Press, brings together artworks by contemporary surrealists such as Rikki Ducornet (in Port Townsend, WA) with those of Portland anarchists such as Jesse Narens, an artist and musician. The vibrant connections between surrealism and anarchism were evident at the packed launch event. Portland's anarchist community turned out in large numbers to hear Sakolsky's thoughts on the surrealist re-enchantment of the word in the imagination and the surrealist search for an “emancipatory mythology” across 19^thutopian socialists of the 20th century such as Charles Fourier. In discussing chapters of his book such as “The Wonderful Dance of Anarchy and Individuality,” Sakolsky emphasized that the Surrealist revolution was inherently playful, poetic, and continuously unfolding in an autonomous, decentralized manner.

In my own study of Surrealism as a form of social protest over the past decade, I have come to recognize its importance for a whole generation of international activists after World War II. While Guy Debord and the Situationist International are best known for their contemptuous but deeply deviant appropriation of Surrealism between the 1950s and 1970s, there were many more young radicals during this period who looked to Surrealism as a model for their resistance efforts.

In the United States, interest in Surrealism in the 1960s and 1970s was concentrated in ultra-left groups that sometimes had a direct connection to Situationism, but in other cases had no connection at all. The most obvious example is the founding of the Surrealist movement in the United States in Chicago in 1966 by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont and some of their associates from the Solidarity Bookshop and beyond. The Chicago Surrealists simultaneously engaged with anarchism, communism, and other forms of socialism, but ultimately the anarchist orientation was the dominant one, as is evident from the books published by the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company. A fellow countryman of their group, Bernard Marszalek, the brains behind Ztangi Press, never became a Surrealist, but continued to be attracted to Surrealist discourses against wage labor and others.

By and large, most of the post-World War II activists who turned to Surrealism never became Surrealists themselves, and that is what is fascinating about it. Surrealism persisted and transcended itself. Surrealism was a companion approach for radicals who were looking for existing examples of a life of deliberate action and resistance. Beyond the Morea and Black MaskThere are other stories of global activist surrealism after World War II waiting to be rediscovered. Some of these involve anarchist activists, but people with Marxist-communist leanings were also attracted to surrealism, despite the movement's final and uncompromising break with the Communist Party in 1935. Little has been written about the Situationist-affiliated Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous in Berkeley in the late 1960s, but in my recent conversations with CEM co-founder Isaac Cronin, it became clear that surrealism was a central source for their group.

One such story is that of Jonathan Leake, an anarchist who saw surrealism as a crucial part of his oppositional arsenal. In 2023, I collaborated with Eberhardt Press to publish a book entitled Revival! Jonathan Leake, radical surrealism and the revival youth movement, 1964-1967which anthologized a selection from Leake’s rare anarchist zine Resurgence (twelve issues; printed in New York, Chicago, San Francisco; fall 1964–March 1967). Along with Walter Caughey, Paul Leake, and others, Jonathan Leake founded the Resurgence Youth Movement and its zine in New York City with the goal of undermining capitalist-imperialist white supremacy through oppositional direct action, public speaking, and the formation of solidarity networks through underground publications.

This Sunday, April 14^th2024, at 3:00 p.m. EST, the International Society for the Study of Surrealism will host a free online book launch of this text featuring contributors to the book and a founding member of the Resurgence Youth Movement, Paul Leake.

~ Abigai Susik

Abigail Susik is a fellow of the National Humanities Center and an associate professor of art history at Willamette University.

Image: Ben Morea / 3/17 UNTITLED SERIES 11 #1 / Color and ink on watercolor paper