Surrealist sabotage and the war on work

Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and co-editor of Surrealism and film after 1945 (2021)

• Introduction1 Genealogy of the surrealist work refusal2 Surrealist automatism as symbolic sabotageSimone Breton and the gendered labour of the surrealist automatistTracing stenographic surrealism and the dame dactylographePsychic automatism and feminisation3 Óscar Domínguez: autonomy and autoeroticism‘These phosphorescent youths’: Domínguez and surrealism, 1934–35Domínguez’s Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle (1934-35)Operating Maldoror’s vamp machine Dysfunctional tools in Domínguez’s anti-work oeuvre4 Direct action surrealism in ChicagoPrologue: activist avant-garde‘Incendiary time bomb’: The Rebel Worker (1964–66)Robert Green, Gallery Bugs Bunny, and Chicago automatismChicago surrealism and Herbert Marcuse contra the performance principleEpilogue: override dysfunctions and the ‘Klapheck computer’Index

'[A] meticulously researched and theoretically accomplished contribution to Surrealist scholarship.'David Hopkins, The Burlington Magazine‘Most scholarly works on surrealism tend to ignore or minimize its strong political dimension, its radical anticapitalist attitude, its commitment to revolutionary human emancipation. This is not the case with this brilliant essay, which does not ignore the highly explosive, radical and subversive nature of the movement founded by André Breton in 1924.’Michael Löwy, Modernism/Modernity'Susik succeeds in eliciting tantalizing frictions around the relation of avant-garde movements to leftist politics.'Kaegan Sparks, Artforum'To read Susik here is to enjoy the generosity of her stimulating and seditious theoretical thoughts. Her Surrealist fever-dream history of subversion as sex machine invites you into a contemplation of your intimate erotic life, put in relationship to its oppression — and to find within that oppression not despair, but insinuations of a secret saboteur.'Joseph Nechvatal, The Brooklyn Rail'The text is richly illustrated with examples from a broad range of media, supporting the author’s central focus on the efficacy and enduring relevance of surrealist art practice in critiquing the role of work in art and society.'Sara Schumacher, Choice‘This original and enthralling work is not only indispensable for understanding the political and revolutionary core of surrealism but for rethinking strategies of resistance and creation in the present. With this lucid critical study, Abigail Susik recovers an insurgent surrealism at a moment when global capitalism is escalating the immiseration of human labour and when its productivist imperatives are devastating the planet.’Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University‘Abigail Susik’s brilliant account of surrealism’s sustained aesthetic subversion and outright attack on compulsive wage labour and its genealogy in the late-nineteenth century radically reorients our understanding of this influential international movement. With great erudition and conceptual savvy, she places surrealism in the social history of work-place rationalisation, labour struggles and the feminisation of white-collar labour. Surrealist automatism is shown to function like work-to-rule sabotage. Automatic writing emerges as a gendered subversion of the automation of the work place present in surrealist photography and in the eroticised imagery of the typewriter and the sewing machine. Surrealism can still inspire challenges to the nature and organisation of work in the information age.’Andreas A. Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University‘Charting the rejection of the so-called “work ethic” by the surrealists in their theory and art, this groundbreaking study sheds new light on the activities of the surrealist movement in the 1920s, 1930s and 1960s, across two continents. Abigail Susik’s deeply impressive investigative scope, combined with precise attention to historical, social and economic context, yields new interpretations of a wide range of work-resistant, pleasure-principled, anarcho-Freudian forays into poetry, painting, photography and sculpture by surrealists, drawing upon a truly extraordinary range of scholarly sources. Mentored by theorists from Marx to Marcuse, surrealist techniques and imagery are revealed as instruments of the saboteur. Meanwhile, urgent questions that are so rarely broached today with the kind of clarity given them by workshy surrealists and their ultra-left allies – who works, for what, at what cost and why bother? – are raised on every page of this illuminating book, demonstrating that surrealism lives, loves and plays, but does not labour: yesterday, today and tomorrow.Gavin Parkinson, Senior Lecturer in European Modernism at The Courtauld Institute of Art‘The best recent writing on the [Surrealist] movement manages to recapture that urgency, that allure, for our own time [including] art historian Abigail Susik’s 2021 volume “Surrealist Sabotage.”’Tom McDonough, The Conversation