Louis Bourgeois: What led you to write Surrealism and the Sacred? How long did the research and writing take, and how was the book received—critically as well as interpretively—when it first appeared?

Celia Rabinovitch: I was always curious about the effect that surrealist art had on me. The works captured me with an unsettling feeling—a creeping sensation of unease—the sensation of the uncanny. This sensation was particularly true of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte. Surrealism appeals to the child or the adolescent in us, rebelling against conventional depictions of reality—it beats back the reasonable, acceptable, view of the world. Visionary intensity demands an "innocent eye", because experience insulates us from a direct apprehension of the world. The paradox of Surrealism fascinates; but we cannot decipher a contradiction without losing it.

René Magritte's The False Mirror (Le faux miroir) (1929).

Where I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a tradition of darkly psychological surrealist art exists. I was influenced by the teachers at the School of Art, where I began studying at the age of 17. Even before that I was interested in Surrealism; also modern poetry and Asian traditions. I liked the imagist poets' assertion that a complex feeling could be conveyed through a single image, even an ordinary image. At the same time, my experience of art became a kind of meditation on what I saw, as in Zen Buddhism. The perceptions I had while drawing or painting made everything express a mysterious, elusive meaning. I felt what the Buddhists call the "isness" of the thing. These sensations wrapped into my experience of Surrealism—its search for an altered state of mind, receptive to mysterious enchantment, its rejection of logic for the reversals of black humor, passion and the imagination, and the use of automatic painting or writing.

I began writing on Surrealism as an undergraduate. At McGill in Montreal, for graduate school—I was in the Faculty of Religious Studies doing work in modern art and Asian religions—I took a course in Surrealism with W.O. Judkins. Jud was also a twin, as I am. He was an authority on Cubism's development of spatial ambiguity, and forty years older than me. I had a nineteenth century tutorial education at McGill, where I was allowed to develop in an idiosyncratic way. We had one of those serendipitous connections between the old and young that became a powerful friendship—fueled by a simpatico state of mind that often resulted in thought transference. He was wiry and brusque, intellectually adventurous, irreverent and blunt, and without artifice. Innately a New England transcendentalist from upstate New York, he had a feeling for Taoism and philosophy and was psychically attuned to others with prescient vision. The paper I wrote for him—on Surrealism and fetishism and power objects—began a long romance with Surrealism that stems from my experience as an artist. I was probably involved with writing and researching Surrealism and the Sacred for fifteen years.

I always intended to write Surrealism and the Sacred as a book. The original title of my dissertation was The Surreal and the Sacred: Archaic, Occult and Daemonic Elements in Modern Art. I read the symbolists, the history of science, Freud, and the history of psychoanalysis, ethnography, symbolic anthropology and archaic religions—following my interest in art as an embodiment of experience. I wanted to write a history with narrative momentum, employing intertwining figures and themes, as in Roger Shattuck's quartet of figures in his remarkable book, The Banquet Years.

I met Roger Shattuck twice, once in Boulder, Colorado, and then again in 1988 at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, when he invited me to co-direct a student production of Apollinaire's play, Ocean Letter. I prize the signed poster of this that he gave me. He was a bohemian, very sympathetic to my work, and a vivid writer. He encouraged me to keep working on my book—he said, "This one won't die on the vine". He especially liked my work on Nerval and Max Müller. Norman Cohn, whose brilliant book The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Agesuncovers sub-cultural tendencies in medieval Europe that extend into Surrealism, also influenced me. Neither he nor Shattuck had advanced degrees—they followed immense curiosity and passion for their subject. I was fortunate to also meet Norman Cohn in Montreal, and I remember him, over drinks, directing me to look at Huysmans and the anti-Catholicism of the late 19th century. A moment of surrealist serendipity was pointed out in Norman Cohn's obituary in The Guardian (August 9, 2007) by Richard Webster, who writes that in Cohn's life "matters of the heart were as important to him as matters of the head....He married the historian Vera Broido, the daughter of Menshevik revolutionaries, who had previously lived in a ménage à trois with Raoul Hausmann, one of the founders of Dada."

Another writer who influenced me was M. H. Abrams, whose work Natural Supernaturalism explores the "moment" of epiphany in Wordsworth and the Romantics. His book understands poetry as a state of mind- an embodiment of insight or a moment of consciousness. Few art historians make that leap into the experiential—they seem stuck in notions of progressive or predictive history or in deconstructive theory that ignores the art. My approach has met little support from art historians, but has captured the imagination of poets and artists. Despite working in academia, I am now firmly placed on the fringes, as an alternative thinker—which is fine, in fact it's better.

To anyone writing or revising a book for a university press I would say, "Don't". A southern University Press held up the book in three revisions. They were never going to publish it, because there were too many illustrations. The book was held up for so long, that it stopped my ability to work on other things, and I have ideas about modernism and Asian art and poetry that I want to explore. I lived with the manuscript for a long time, rewriting and editing in Denver, Syracuse (as a visiting artist), Vancouver, and San Francisco. I think I did some of my best painting, the series The Grotto Cycle, during that time.

Finally I withdrew the manuscript from the university press and sent it to HarperCollins' Icon Editions, who also published Shattuck's The Banquet Years. The editor, Cass Canfield Jr. (whose father had edited E.B. White and James Thurber) was a critical editor with a visor, pencil, and rolled up shirtsleeves. He liked my book but thought it more intellectual history than art history—so he sent it to Westview Press, who published it within 18 months. Then Westview absorbed HarperCollins' Icon Editions, so it was actually published by the press I wanted. I don't know what happened to Mr. Canfield—he may have left publishing, or his position was lost in the corporate takeover. He was an original from the old school.

The best initial review was written by the poet George Kalamaras in the fall 2002 edition of Rain Taxi, a major book review journal from Minnesota. He understood the aims of the book, and I was grateful for his statement that the book, "refigures the 'boundaries' of thought and knowledge.... an in-depth reexamination of the boundaries of consciousness". The other two reviews came from Winnipeg, in 2003 in Prairie Fire, a literary and poetry journal, and a Canadian art review journal.

The Canadian art review journal was not positive, but it was more opinion than assessment. It was based mainly on a critique of my bibliography, as the author did not seem to know the difference between a trade press and a university press. In a trade press you only cite the books you quote. The editor did not allow me to write a rebuttal. The review wasn't well researched, and if anyone had examined it, it would be unsupportable. There is always an art historical need for hegemony over the discipline. I'm pleased that Surrealism and the Sacred is read by people in creative writing, history of religions, art history, esoteric studies, and studio practice. Artists and poets are attracted to it, because its language recognizes the creative experience. It has received increasing critical attention worldwide—in England, Germany, Italy, Korea and Japan. It has captured a lot of web attention—with artists or poets contacting me for support. Ironically, it's now cited in a lot of major art historical works.

L.B.: How far did your research for Surrealism and the Sacred take you into French symbolist art and poetry? Can it be said with any accuracy that the French symbolists were precursors of the surrealists?

C.R.: I read Nerval and Baudelaire in the original. I also looked at the femme fatale in symbolist art, and traced the 19th century origins of surrealism. Symbolism has literary sources. There isn't a clear trajectory leading from Symbolism to Surrealism. I found a strong connection to Surrealism in Romanticism, where Turner gave form to the sublime energies of nature, and Caspar David Friedrich pitted the person against distant spaces. I prefer the Romantic's whirling energies of nature to Symbolism's tamer literary narratives.

Symbolism drew from the mythologies of the past, from the ancient near East and the Hellenistic world. These dovetailed with colonialism to produce a fascination with all things exotic or "oriental". The late 19th century interest in "the orient" reversed the colonial subjugation of these countries by envisioning them as erotic or exotic. But the use of narrative and mythology in Symbolism limited its originality. I don't think it's accurate to say that Surrealism grew directly from Symbolism, because symbolist painters often illustrate myths, appealing to our guilty enjoyment of sentiment. In contrast, the surrealists sought the origins of the imagination that creates dreams, images and mythologies. While the symbolists explored earlier mythologies, the surrealists uncovered the impulses by which those mythologies were formed. The force of the imagination that impelled the surrealists intensified in the early 20th century.

Surrealism became a much more original movement than Symbolism, creating original visual ideas and mythologies rather than relying on ancient motifs. Primarily it was the French poets—Gérard de Nerval and Baudelaire—who provided the intellectual platform for Surrealism. The other major influences were Giorgio de Chirico, and of course, Freud. Nerval connected supernaturalism with a somnambulistic dream state. His imagery layered archaic, Egyptian, Christian, and personal motifs. He focused on the sublime and erotic power of the woman as his lover, a muse, the goddess, and the Virgin Mary, wrapped into one image. Neglected for many years except by the surrealists, Nerval pointed the surrealists toward a profound, mutable eroticism—amour fou.

Self-Portrait (What Shall I Love If Not the Enigma?) (1911) by Giorgio de Chirico.

L.B.: Based on the enormity of the research you've done in Surrealism and the Sacred is it safe to say that the surrealists were working within the French literary/artistic tradition of heterodoxy, mysticism, and revolution? What is it about surrealism that is original, unique?

C.R.: The Surrealists rejected all tradition, but used heterodox streams of thought to attack Catholicism and the bourgeois mentality. As much talk as there is of Surrealism's rejection of logic, I think that André Breton attempted to justify Surrealism through citing the occult sciences or mysticism, such as the tarot, Tibetan Buddhism, and parapsychology. The Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes and its publication, La Révolution Surréaliste used a pseudo scientific format to send up empiricism. The magazine demonstrates Breton's need to develop a "rationale" for Surrealism. He was more of a theorist, a demagogue, than an artist. The Manifestoes of Surrealism ultimately are characterized by a subversive ideology—and hampered by a high seriousness—that is a trap that the best of the art avoids.

Surrealism's originality arises from its art, not its political arguments between artists or writers that continue to this day. I am the subject—I suspect they want a "victim"—of one of these—in a web site that shall remain unnamed. Those who spend their time arguing the fine points of Surrealism seem petty and pedantic. Imagination and intuition give us alternatives to retinal vision and logic in a way that a sequential argument never can. In the image, in poetic associations, in music's harmonic structures we apprehend simultaneously the contradictions of emotion and sensation. This is the only understanding of completion that we can experience beyond mysticism or intimacy with another.

Perhaps the traditions of Western esotericism are marginalized because they understand the world through matter—transformed in alchemy, employed in ritual, developed in herbalism, and manifested in nature. For the same reason the dominant cultures of the west have rejected the body—to deny we are matter is to deny death. The alternative, poetic view of the world comes from our physical experience of matter. The imagination creates metaphor from matter, while reason denies it connection to feeling, except for its functional use. The surrealists embodied their metaphors through matter—bone, fur, sand, flesh. What is Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined tea-cup without the creepy sensation of drinking from it?

Meret Oppenheim. Object. Paris, 1936. On view: MoMA, Floor 5, room 517, The Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries

L.B.: Do you think there is a lack of supernaturalism in contemporary art? Or, is it just the opposite; is there too much supernaturalism in contemporary art?

C.R.: Contemporary art defines supernaturalism differently than the original medieval meaning of St. Thomas Aquinas, who differentiated between the natural and the supernatural as two different planes of reality. The surrealists understood the supernatural as a phenomenon related to parapsychology—which requires a receptivity that is opposed to the merchandising of contemporary art. Contemporary art uses supernaturalism to manipulate the viewer—it creates an extraordinary effect that elicits a feeling of awe through indefinite spaces (the liquor bottle floating in the sky, a la Magritte) or by using surrealistic devices such as grotesquely animating inert human body parts, as in the contemporary American artist Tony Oursler's disembodied heads and eyes (created through digital projections). Other artists use theatrical or atmospheric effects to create ambiguity through which images become disconnected from their context, and thereby accumulate fetishistic meaning.

Obscura (2014) by Tony Oursler , exhibited at the Galerie Hans Mayer .

In order to draw us into a commodity fetishism that drives consumers, contemporary advertising makes the most of Surrealism's techniques of surprise, reversal, irreverence, and isolation of the object. Art directors have created an applied Surrealism that focuses the viewer on the transcendent or erotic experience encapsulated by the consumer object. Brand names shamelessly make fetishes of ordinary objects, whetting the consumerist appetite for the status they confer.

We live in a materialistic culture, and artists love to go against the grain. The seemingly supernatural effects of contemporary art owe more to the side show theatrics of 19th century spiritualism than to a naïve apprehension of the supernatural. Supernaturalism becomes ironically postmodernist when it is used to critique materialism while still employing the sensationalism of a materialistic culture. For the Love of God, Damien Hirst's diamond studded skull exploits this supernatural effect. Intrinsically, diamonds have a transparent, electric energy. The skull recalls death, but death made beautiful, desirable. The excessive diamond in the skull's forehead appeals to the contemporary appetite for luxury. The artist titled his work using the astonished exclamation of his mother when he told her of his creation, suggesting the cynicism of his approach. Numbers line up to see this excessive work, reinforcing the shallow celebrity culture in which we live, rather than any authentic experience of the supernatural. For that we must look to archaic art for a sense of mystery. The archaic world gave form to mythic energies that post-modernists are either incapable of seeing, or too cleverly cynical to acknowledge.

For the Love of God ,(2007 ) by Damien Hirst, original inaugural exhibition at London's White Cube Gallery

In this direction, I find much of contemporary literature's interest in the supernatural contrived. Supernatural imagery has become de rigueur; it provides the "magic" in magic realism where extraordinary phenomena intrude into ordinary events. In contemporary Latin American fiction, supernaturalism has become systematized into a certain genre. For that sense of the extraordinary I look to Jorge Luis Borges, who takes the paradoxical intertwining of the metaphysical and the actual into a complex mental state of reflection and loss.

L.B.: How would you explain what is meant by the "sacred" in modern art?

C.R.: The experience of the sacred eclipses containment by religion. It arises from the imagination opening to visionary experience. The sacred is elusive. Human spirituality is independent of religion, and escapes its containment through individual experiences in nature, love, and creativity. The human imagination gives form to sacred power, altering or compartmentalizing it in religions. Religions ritualize relationships (as in family structure and marriage) by creating a community of believers. Religions are systems.

The sacred manifests itself in art from prehistory on as an ineffable power that demands expression, embodiment, humility, or awe. The artist has an opening to the sacred through the imagination, because only through the imagination can one perceive its mutable power. If it exists, it exists as a feeling, in our perception of the world, as well as conceptually, in a worldview. One can hardly argue with a feeling, it is or isn't there—that's the beauty of it. Artists discover the sacred through their unwillingness to accept things as they are, to disregard the functional definitions of things, to uncover a poetic reality that has depth. Modern European artists sought the sacred but rejected religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Initially modern art was attracted to a Platonic notion of the sacred as something pure, inviolable, and eternal. Hence, Kazimir Malevich's suprematist squares. By contradiction, the surrealists found the sacred as elemental, elusive, and dangerous—an amoral, erotic power—a sense of dark, daemonic energy—that sidestepped conventional spiritual categories. Through automatic writing or painting or through dreams, the surrealists opened themselves to a primary experience of the sacred as an ambivalent, disruptive, power. Their experience of mysticism cannot be defined except as contradiction or paradox.

There has been some contention about my having written that the surrealists were involved in the sacred. Robert Belton (The Beribboned Bomb) and Guy Ducornet respectively think that I am naïvely essentialist or as the latter writer suggests, simply wrong, because he does not distinguish between religion and the phenomenology of the sacred. There is a sense of propriety over Surrealism in some writers. But then, I write as an artist who is interested in the apprehension of things difficult to talk about, that art gives form to.

L.B.: How is it that 20th century Surrealism "exists at the border between art and religion"?

C.R.: In my book, I wrote that Surrealism develops on the threshold between art and religion. More precisely, we should use the word "sacred" rather than religion. Like Buddhism, Surrealism creates an awareness of mind in our experience of the world. The surrealists sought a direct experience of the mind—they investigated parapsychology, Tibetan Buddhism, as well as shamanic art and vivid dreaming—anything to escape the confines of a mediated experience of the world. While many scholars interpret Surrealism's interest in the mind as psychoanalytic—and certainly it employs psychoanalytic processes to critique modern culture's elevation of reason—the surrealist understanding of mind is larger.

The source of creative insight still remains obscure for us. I once received a rejection letter (from the editor of October) saying that I was "naïve and jejune" in asserting that the surrealists were actually interested in fetishism and magic, because everyone knew that they took their ideas from Jacques Lacan. While Lacan may have informed Breton's arguments, I find this kind of intellectualism to be blindly self-referential. Anyone who is a practicing artist knows that art often arises from a direct apprehension of something—a feeling—to become a visual idea. Only later does the artist feel the need to develop a rationale for their approach. Mainly, what I meant by "the border between art and religion", is that threshold between the conscious mind and the subconscious imagination, where symbols, myths, art, and religious forms emerge. The creative imagination constructs all these things—dream, myth, art, and religion—all constructs of the imagination. Surrealism goes to the source, the imagination, and provoking it to effect an authentic, perhaps a dangerous, experience of the world.

L.B.: You write in Surrealism and the Sacred "The pursuit of the numinous emotion was central to modern artists for whom traditional religions and philosophies were bankrupt." This seems a fair enough statement, but what could you say about modern art itself now six or seven decades later, is modern art itself bankrupt? There are some of us so burned out on everything, even modern art.

C.R.: We have to make the distinction between modern and contemporary art. A Matisse, or De Chirico painting, a Wallace Stevens or Ginsburg poem, a Borges story still have the power to move us because they embody the artist's vitality, an authentic feeling of life. These artists were not apologists for sincerity, for striving for something beyond reach. Contemporary art rarely pursues authenticity. The universities promote cleverness, irony, and conceptualism. Once you get the message you hang up the phone. Who needs art that is only a message?

I'm not talking about an art that has to enhance or beautify life. Even curators agree that fewer people go to museums and galleries because the layering of theory discourages them. People are burnt out on the sense that they have to strive to get it, and when they do—so what. There is a lot of hype in the art world—it has become like the music world, a youth cult that encourages artists to seek celebrity first—we have spawned a culture of self-reflexive dandies. Universities are training students to be artists, rather than to make art. That's like pretending to be a lover rather than making love.

L.B.: You write in Surrealism and the Sacred that "...the unique state of mind embodied in surrealist art can be described by the language of insight for which the Chinese or Japanese artist developed a vocabulary many years before one developed in Europe." Can you comment on why it took the West so long to catch up with this Eastern "language of insight"?

C.R.: The East's notion of self-realization is opposed to the West's collectively defined notion of the sacred. Since Christianity, nothing in the Western religious worldview encouraged personal realization. The Biblical tradition was narrative; lyrical, internal states of mind. In the West these are linked to devotional literature. Personal revelation or a direct experience of the holy was heresy according to the Catholic Church, which persecuted first the Cathars, then Francis of Assisi, then Luther. Meditative practices in the west implied extreme forms of devotion, such as denial and penitence. Those who had a personal vision were often punished as heretics, as was Francis of Assisi for his belief that one can experience God directly through nature, that creation was sacred.

The vision of St. Francis turned the artists of Renaissance Italy and the 17th century Dutch painters towards a romance with nature, rejected as corrupt by the Church. Others such as Meister Eckhart or Jakob Böhme lived on the spurious fringes of Christian thought.

The notion of the self as the window to the soul was more or less non-existent in the West until the early Renaissance. In India as well as China there was never the strict Western division between the natural and supernatural worlds. While the Christian West distinguished between the supernatural and natural worlds, and condemned the fragile body to the corruptible, natural world, Asian cultures accepted the body and the self as the ephemeral vehicle through which one could attain enlightenment—even if the insight was non-attachment to self. While those in the West believed in an eternal soul, in Asia there was no eternal self, because the self was as fleeting as everything else in the world. Even so, through the self one found the Buddha nature, the insight or satori, or the Enlightenment experience of Nirvana that could inform the rest of one's life.

Chinese traditions such as Taoism are bound by materiality or physicality in their understanding of the world. Matter becomes metaphor. Matter and metaphor were indistinguishable and formed forceful poetic associations in Chinese medicine and poetry. For the ancient Chinese artist/monk, materiality simultaneously carried both a physical and a spiritual potency. This is the basis of Chinese medicine (herbalism) where the essence of a plant or herb is extracted through a process of reduction through boiling. These physical properties also act spiritually; the body-mind connection was apparent to the Chinese in their understanding of food, water, placement of objects, the location of a house, or the orientation of a doorway. All of these things express the flow of chi—the vital energy that animates all things. This is, of course, bigger than libido.

Taoism, the tradition of which we speak, is by turns, playful, paradoxical, and solitary. Taoism, and its later expression in Ch'an Buddhism, seeks solitary illumination. Through this solitary, individual struggle the Chinese artist uncovered his or her creativity. Many Ch'an Buddhists were also artists or poets. The brush strokes, both material and spiritual, expressed "chi"—energy. The subtle tones suggested a dreamy state of suspended time. "Seeing" something was based on the meditative ideal of becoming that thing. To paint with integrity, the artist must meditate on it, do many studies, and then execute their work in one stroke. The master and the pupil have a special relationship—a "secret tradition of knowledge outside books or words." The knowledge, the insight, is not formal or sequential—it appears in a moment of extended time and then vanishes, leaving a new state of mind. The Chinese scholar/artists were much more attuned to perceptual psychology than their medieval counterparts, who labored as artisans under the patronage of Church or State. This fundamental separation in the Western world view prevented a unified understanding of art as insight until the 19th century romantic artists pulled away from the formal structures of power.

L.B.: How would you describe modernism in art, literature, and thought and further does it still exist?

C.R.: Modernism is a state of mind, embodied in the attitude of certain paintings and poetry from the birth of the French avant-garde in the 1880s until the 1960s—around the beginning of Abstract Expressionism. Minimalism was the extremity of modernism. Until recently art historians saw modernism moving in a historical trajectory from symbolism and Post Impressionism, through Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Writers and poets were open to the idea of cross-influences and the intrinsic value of art rather than its historical place or classification. Now, it's accepted that the ideology of progress in art is a historicist notion. We need to take from modernism the intrinsic value of its art and literature—its fresh methods, raw energy, lack of embellishment, rejection of 19th century seamless narratives, and its insistence on the viewer's direct engagement.

Look at the relationship between Cubism and surrealism. While each movement has been studied in depth separately, they are seldom looked at together. Superficially they have a different aesthetic. Dig deep, and you find that they are connected in the use of contradiction or ambivalence. While Cubism creates visual ambivalence through multiple points of view, surrealist art creates psychological ambivalence, evoking attraction and repulsion simultaneously. Modernism in art and literature embraces contradiction and simultaneity. The ambiguity and ambivalence create the meaning. It evokes a complex state of mind in which we must hold various meanings and images in tandem. Modern literature—from the poetry of Eliot, Pound, to Stevens and Ginsberg, uses a right angled and disjunctive approach in its use of different voices, which the reader has to connect, in the way the viewer has to connect the disparate elements in a painting. There no longer is a seamless, sequential narrative—modernism offers a prismatic perspective. This is what links cubism and surrealism, although modern art history tends to see these as sequential movements in the upward rising spiral staircase of art.

Modernism exists every time we experience the sensations of simultaneity and contradiction in art. But to evoke contradiction, modernism requires a familiarity and ease with the Western canon—with the humanistic "big picture", so that one "gets" all the associations, and receives pleasure from their disruption. It requires a certain fluency in literature or art, as well as a sense of tactility, materiality, pleasure and personal taste, all of which are spurned by the current art establishment. As a practice, modern, or rather contemporary art has been flattened to shock and innovation without content—conniving for press coverage - a reduction of the motive to épater la bourgeoisie. But art can surprise us with its resilience.

L.B.: Do you think "true" surrealist art is being created here at the beginning of the 21st century?

C.R.: Contemporary surrealism is expressed in advertising, where the art directors have learned how to use the power of surprise, to isolate the object and to sell a heightened experience. They use the fascination excited by surrealist techniques to develop consumerist desires. These effects are so ubiquitous that most of the public could not recognize their source in surrealist art. Surrealism has been subverted by consumerism—but it is remarkable how in this guise it gives rise to humor, irreverence, and play. The other contemporary surrealist art tends towards the theatrics of supernaturalism, or towards derivatives of Dali or de Chirico, where psychedelic posters meet high art: the weird as entertainment.

L.B.: Simple question: is there any way you can label what artistic era we are in presently? Is it still a post-modern age, or is it post-post modern, or are categories like these mere illusions that don't help us understand ourselves as artists and writers in the world at all?

For me, art must have authenticity. Like music, art is evident only by itself. Explanations of zeitgeist are interesting for scholars and cultural historians, who subsume art or poetry into their own ideas. But, art is also a historical document, incontrovertible, original, and complex. To reduce one's art to post modernism might be good for marketing, but it doesn't make the art live. We are in the age of irony—not a complex irony—a sound bite irony, deliberately offhand. It has an adolescent irreverence, which would be refreshing except that much of it has marketing motives. I would also say that we are in the age of cynicism—a cynicism that makes art an instrument to create a pre-determined, literal position. Such instrumentalism may refer to cultural ideas, but can't give them the vitality of an embodied meaning. Post modernism's stance that everything is a coded language has become thin and lifeless.

L.B.: Does it at all bother you that Salvador Dali supported fascist Spain? Or, because he was such a great artist, does this matter? I suppose this poses the question, was Dali a great artist?

C.R.: Dali was the Liberace of the art world. He was called "Avida Dollars" by the surrealists—referring to his unscrupulous greed and need for attention. This trait also appears in Dali's admiration of fascism. The Franco regime tolerated him as a symbol of Spanish artistry and he perversely made statements of support for fascism, perhaps to pique André Breton, who expelled him from the movement in 1934. Dali was affiliated with anarchism in his youth. In supporting fascism he was rebellious and offensive while following his instincts for pageantry and oligarchy. While Dali had tremendous powers of imagination and technical accomplishment to match, his content was lacking—more so as he got older. Like Giorgio de Chirico, he was brilliant when young, but seemed to experience a decline in his visionary inspiration as he became older. André Breton, that most purist of the surrealists, understood that the lust for wealth and celebrity had consumed Dali.

"Salvador Dalí with Magnifying Glass" (also known as "The Astute Eye" ), 1946. Photo: Philippe Halsman.

I think that those who hold themselves up as exemplars of a movement need to demonstrate integrity with regard to their values. Otherwise, as an audience we experience at some level the incongruence of their art and their actions. Dali's fascism countered Breton's position—but ironically, they overlap in the occult, to which Breton turned in 1937. Then, Dali took refuge in an extravagant Catholicism that informs his later imagery. We don't know whether Dali used fascism to capture attention, or to be different than the surrealists, or to separate from the struggling Spanish proletariat as a scion of the Franco regime. Whatever the motive, he is responsible for his choices. If these incurred the suffering of others, then historians can acknowledge this, rather than sweep it under the rug. This incongruence is difficult for the viewer, because his qualities of imagination and consummate skill co-exist with greed and fascist tendencies. If we feel strongly, we don't have to engage with his art. Many writing in the art world today seem to adhere to what humanists called, "the intentional fallacy": meaning, literally, "trust the tale and not the teller". If we see only the tale, and not the teller, we wear historical blinkers. But then, we also need to separate biography from art. Unfortunately the art world exhibits an increasing tolerance for the 'transgressive' for its own sake. Are we so corrupted by the notion of art as an inviolable realm that we are impressed only by status and renown? On the other hand, Dali is so irreverent and outrageous, that we can't help but be fascinated by him.

The same issue exists with Ezra Pound's poetry. Because he later espoused fascism and anti-Semitism, through radio broadcasts and personal statements, does that discredit the transcendent poetry he wrote in his earlier years? There are those who will not read him; yet his poetry is finely crafted; he is a superb translator of the Chinese poets, who obviously had nothing to do with his politics. As with Dali, also with Pound. We have to separate his poetry from his political affiliations—while recognizing that his character encompasses both.

Finally, I think it is a mistake for many artists to get so involved in politics. Many artists tend to present the issues in moralistic all or nothing terms. Maybe it's better to write an article where your ideas can be examined in the arena in which they have currency, rather than using art to editorialize for politics. With art it's best to stick with what you know.

L.B.: Could you fill in the blanks for those of us who instinctually do not like Freud—who sense in Freud something that is almost anti-surrealistic, that is, a reaction against French literature altogether.

C.R.: Reading Freud is like reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; they are investigative sleuths, following a trail like a dog with a bone. In his writing Freud is a detective novelist, moving inductively through various examples to create his argument, developing the inevitable logic of his conclusions. Recently Freud has been under attack for fictionalizing his research, primarily by Jeffrey Masson (The Assault on Truth), while the post-structuralists discredit him as a conventional white western male, all the while utilizing his concepts such as the unconscious. Both Freud and Jung saw themselves as archaeologists of the soul. I find him a more engrossing writer than Jung, who describes symbols in the morphological approach of the earlier archaeologists, organizing forms in a comparative perspective. Jung's theory of the collective unconscious seems wishful thinking about how we are all connected through symbols. He did not follow the transmigration of symbols across continents and cultures that would have just as effectively proven his theories.

By separating our understanding of Freud from surrealism, we avoid the antipathy of the rational against the visionary mind. Freud is anti-surrealist in logical analysis, but sympathetic with its content. What is so different from the contemporary psychiatrist who inquires about the artist's "symptomology"? I think the antipathy towards Freud would disappear if we accept that he is not a French writer. He makes no pretense of being one. If his works require imagination, it is because they require the logic of symbols. Freud cultivated a positivist understanding of his work because he wanted to popularize it. We forget that for many years he was a bohemian and lived on the fringes of intellectual respectability. He was interested in, and later not impressed by the surrealists. When they visited he observed them with medical remove. In fact, his notes on Dali show he tried to analyze him.

Freud was not popular in France during the twenties and thirties because he was viewed as "too German". After World War I the French had a historical hatred towards the Germans. Anti-Semitic literature linking Freud and others to corruption of Germanic purity found its way to France. Later writers such as Rosalind Krauss look to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan as a major influence on surrealism. This was the intellectual approach of Breton. However, surrealist artists used everything that was available to buttress their ideas. I doubt if, in making their art, the surrealists used psychoanalysis other than as a method—automatic writing and painting.

What many art historians tend to forget, so obvious to every artist, is that every work of art, every poem, becomes an original document that embodies knowledge. Art doesn't need an intellectual argument to justify its existence. Its meaning is like music, evident only through itself—it requires no further explanation other than that we experience it directly. I think we can enjoy Freud for his vivid, often witty yet always self-examining writing style. It has its own momentum.

L.B.: Why would Freud perceive "the ambivalence of the uncanny" as a neurosis? That is, what's wrong with anyone, not only children, with perceiving dolls, for example, as being animate, as possessing spirit? What's wrong with letting our imaginations wander wherever they want to, after all, if there's no overall meaning to ourselves and to the world, etc?

C.R.: I'm not certain that Freud actually did understand the ambivalence of the uncanny as neurosis. He begins his article on the topic from 1919, with the idea of the uncanny as a "peculiar aesthetic emotion". That is still one of the best definitions of the uncanny. I think his later definition of the uncanny having to do either with castration, death, or the loss of the mother, seems to be pushing it. The sense of the uncanny appears in all cultures as an obscure sense of significance, a sense perhaps of being observed or controlled by another, a psychological doubling. Every culture has the myth of the double. While it may be that this is a denial of death, it is still an aesthetic emotion: its best left at that.

L.B.: What is the connection between the surrealist's understanding of the uncanny and a religious or quasi-religious experience?

C.R.: The Surrealist's found the uncanny to be nameless or formless—it was closer to the idea of the informe of Steiner and Lacan. I don't think they connected it to a religious or even quasi-religious experience, because they rejected religion. But in their command of that threshold between the imagination, dream and the sacred they stumbled across the notion of an external power that can invade the most ordinary object or event. That heightening of experience was the sense of the uncanny. Because the sacred, in its raw sense of power, is the source of attraction and repulsion, the uncanny can be seen as one of its vernacular manifestations.

L.B.: How best would you describe the un-canniness of the surrealist's use of dolls and mannequins?

C.R.: We project meaning into the human form, in whatever scale. The viewer identifies with the figure in paintings especially when it is seen from behind; a separate personality is not evident, and that enables the imagination to become that figure, as see the environment of the painting with its eyes. Similarly dolls and mannequins echo the human form, but without individuality. Because of this we can animate them with our own excess energy, the energy of the imagination.

L.B.: The surrealists seem to be suggesting that if we are going to save ourselves in modern culture from annihilation, that we must break completely from reason, i.e., logical thinking. But if we were to break entirely from logic and reason, wouldn't we then lose the ability to think about such grandiose subjects as modern art and surrealism? Perhaps this is another way of saying, that without logic and reason, wouldn't we cease to exist as being truly human? This is obviously an unfair question, but nonetheless an important one.

C.R.: To be doctrinaire, the Manifestoes say that we must break from the dominance of reason. Ironically, Breton in the Manifestoes of Surrealism uses logic to argue for its demise. The surrealists were against the limitations of causal thinking, the endless litany of cause and effect that short circuited the imagination. Imaginative thinking is associative, creative, unpredictable, and revelatory. Seeking such a direct realization of the imagination, the surrealists rejected the realism of retinal vision (the slicing of the eye in Un chien andalou) in favor of the internal world of the imagination.

In their polemics the surrealists argue against the dominance of reason; even so, their ideas are expressed sequentially—in itself a reasonable structuring of thought. In their art and poetry, they abandon the dependence on seamless sequence to use right-angled changes of direction, associations, and surprising images that coalesce into the surreal experience.

As artists and poets who argue for the authority of the imagination, we still use reason, but as a weapon against scientific positivism, its strained vocabulary and its academic propensity to favor the database over the vivid embodiment of feeling.

I don't know that we would not be human without reason and logic. Logic is a construct based on observation—empiricism—but observation gives more than logic, it inspires the imagination. Human culture developed for many years without an explicit use of logic, but through its material expressions in art, music, architecture, agriculture, and medicine. It is a question of proportion, of what we value as knowledge. Our culture has gone so far into functional commodity and instrumental use of others, that it has obliterated the play of imagination, except in advertising and in the marginal world of artists.

L.B.: Why was the search for origins so important to the surrealists? What did they hope to gain by finding a "lost innocence"?

C.R.: They sought direct apprehension of a world that has been obscured by layers of culture. This is the point of Zen and of surrealism—a direct apprehension of the world, in all its mystery and grotesque beauty. They abandoned a stale culture of conventional thinking, for a more vivid one, responsive to sheer wonder. They had to bracket the coded experience of the world to allow for a new sense of play and enchantment.

L.B.: Could you explain why Rosenkreutzism and the notion of the alchemical were so important to surrealism?

C.R.: Transformation—of matter into meaning, of lead into gold—drives both the alchemist and the artist to work with matter, to distill it to its essence. In medieval Europe, the alchemist, the apothecary, and the artist were under the same guild, the sign of the mortar and pestle, because they extracted from matter the elixir, color, or vital energy.

Surrealism's involvement with alchemy arises from André Breton's call for "the profound occultation of surrealism" (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930) until the L'Exposition internationale de Surréalisme à Paris, 1938. Breton signaled the surrealists' dissatisfaction with leftist politics; instead, they sought a new myth for the modern world. For the surrealists, occultism and alchemy made visible how artists transform matter into metaphor. The esoteric traditions of alchemy and Rosicrucianism demonstrated matter's potency. The surrealists pursued the principle of alchemical transformation in how they handled matter. Processes of alchemical transformation were allied to the Surrealists' exploration of magic in fetishism (ethnography), Rosicrucianism (The Chemical Wedding) and of the occult sciences (the tarot). Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Meret Oppenheim, Yves Tanguy, Rene Magritte, and Salvador Dali created visual forms recalling the alchemical prima materia and the philosopher's stone.

L.B.: It seems ironic that Modernists such as the surrealists were obsessed with primitivism and the pursuit of origins. There seems to be something more primitive about modernity than pre-modernity? Please comment on this irony.

C.R.: Modernism attempted to go back to origins—Freud's article on The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words shows how in archaic or primal language, a word can mean its opposite, such as high-deep, father-son, mother-daughter, familiar-strange. Now if you think of these words and of archaic art that shows one thing as part of another—look at archaic Chinese bronzes, for example—you have a "both-and" phenomena. The work can be both this figure and that form. Modern artists and poets were fascinated by this aspect of archaic or "primitive" art and borrowed that principle of opposition from it.

In the Renaissance, a seamless interpretation of vision resulted in the development of perspective, with its fixed frame of reference. This created a single vanishing point, and horizon line, to create a static window on the world. We might say that modernism has no fixed frame of reference, no vanishing point, and no horizon line. It attempts to make visible both this image and that image simultaneously, to give us a different, fluctuating perspective that approximates experiential sensations rather than the objective dimension of human perception.

In poetry, modernism usually rejects the seamless narrative by forcing the reader to think in juxtapositions of images, and by expanding or contracting time, often with an expansive moment or epiphany that opens up all the nuances of experience for the reader.

L.B.: Is Giorgio de Chirico's fifty-year battle with the surrealists emblematic of the polarities that still exist today with regards to formalism vs. organicism (if I may use this term)? Is this dichotomy the difference between leftism and conservatism, in art, in literature?

C.R.: I don't think that Giorgio de Chirico's battle with the surrealism was connected to polarities such as formalism versus organicism, or even leftism and conservatism. De Chirico was a visionary as a young painter—the best of the surrealist painters. Even today his work has such strong color, construction and disturbing emotional tone that it eclipses most of Dali, Tanguy or Ernst. Of all the "dream photographs" created by surrealist painters, his work remains mysterious and irreducible. There is no formal trick or system that can be deciphered. The feeling eclipses all objective formal analysis. Most art historians can't even touch him. William Rubin admits this in his article for the 1982 de Chirico retrospective—he acknowledges that the "ethos" of the work is beyond the grasp of art history.

The surrealists classified the hypersensitive, obstinate De Chirico as conservative, when, in sheer naiveté, he turned towards the conservative principle of Renaissance technique, and then later used it to distinguish himself from the surrealists. I cannot imagine how painful it was for a sensitive artist such as de Chirico to have his work picketed in Paris by his colleagues, who had formerly idolized him. What a betrayal. His writings are a fifty-year argument with Breton, both of them taking themselves too seriously, Breton with a hauteur that is a bit offensive. Breton felt that de Chirico had betrayed Surrealism and become a conservative, lugubrious hack; and de Chirico, whose work had inspired so many of the surrealists to work in a similar vein, felt that they had betrayed him by not supporting his new work. Perhaps he was reacting to the many imitators of his work and wanted to do something new. More likely he had mystical experiences when younger, which he describes in his letters, the Meditations sent to Apollinaire; then that heightened experience of the world faded for him.

L.B.: What exactly is the sacredness that is imbued in surrealist art?

C.R.: In surrealism, the sacred appears as a fearsome sense of power and mystery, eros as numinous experience, subtly emerging as tenderness or love, a focus on the obscure nuance of another's presence, or as an amoral libidinal energy absorbed from a direct apprehension of reality. It is a profound ambivalence—a sense of attraction and repulsion in the face of nature, a person or a thing. For artist, the sacred arises from the perception of the extraordinary within the ordinary, in letting go of the dependence on sequential reasoning—a direct apprehension of the contradiction embedded in life—attraction/repulsion; beauty/disgust; energy/decay—leading to a perception of mystery. It is the uncanny as an "obscure sense of significance".

L.B.: What did the sacred mean to the surrealists?

C.R.: The surrealists avoided thinking about the sacred, except when they invented new forms to express it. They were repulsed by, and rejected, Western religion. Although the Manifestoes claim to lay waste to religion, I think they mean Catholicism and Christianity. The surrealists were interested in numerology, in the Kabala, in Tibetan Buddhism. Breton wrote an open letter to the Dalai Lama because he knew that Buddhism aimed for a change in consciousness. The Surrealists were fascinated by non-Western religions that they discovered through ethnography. Miró, for example, was inspired by shamanic Inuit masks, and by the anthropology of Lévy-Bruhl.

The surrealists were fascinated by manifestations of sacred power—which is to say a sense of attraction and repulsion, the sense of something breaking through ordinary experience to open up a new vision or reality. We could say that they saw the sacred as the razor that slices through the eye.

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Celia Rabinovitch is an artist, writer, and scholar holding an MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a PhD in the history of religions and art from McGill University. She has directed programs and taught at institutions across the United States and Canada, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Manitoba. Her published works include Surrealism and the Sacred and Duchamp's Pipe: A Chess Romance. Louis Bourgeois is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and interviews in over 300 magazines and journals and is the author of the National Book Award nominated , The Gar Diaries, and the award-winning collection of poems, OLGA.   He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, as well as the Program Director for the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative.

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