José Pierre, editor, Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions 1928-32 – Camden New Journal.
Kate Webb is a journalist and critic. She lives in London. That the surrealists in their unbridling of the imagination and the subconscious challenged conventional ways of thinking – or preferably not thinking – about sex, will come as no surprise. Less well known is that with the subversions of their art, poetry, drama and fiction, they also undertook scientific research. Their unique method, combining investigation with collective experience, was derided as unscientific, but as they weren’t aiming to impress the establishment this didn’t trouble them. What they wanted was to produce a body of counter-knowledge about neglected aspects of everyday life, and to create an archive of the kinds of human experience usually obscured by propriety, censorship or fear. With this in mind, in October 1924, André Breton, the movement’s founder and principle theorist, together with a group of friends, set up the Bureau of Surrealist Research on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris, inviting the public to drop by with stories of chance and coincidence or ideas about how life might be different. From here they also produced their journal, La Révolution Surréaliste, publishing in 1928 the first of twelve inquiries into the meaning and practice of sex – a subject then so taboo it could land a speaker or writer in jail. Their recherches took the form of group discussions which proceeded by means of testimony, disagreement and interrogation (Breton was a trained psychoanalyst). As JoAnn Wypijewski notes in her Introduction to Investigating Sex, there was “no unity of desire” among the participants, “even on the small matters.” more here... http://katewebb.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/jose-pierre-editor-investigating-sex-surrealist-discussions-1928-32-camden-new-journal/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
