Whole Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to cool spiders that infest Sophie's basement with the occasional centipede house centipedes. Ideally, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and today we are not talking about bugs, not talking.
About my current trauma.
Nope, I'm really allergic to spider bites.
I don't hate them as a concept, but spiders and mer are not compatible.
My first real viral post on Instagram was at my old cabin. I had this like tiny dollhouse mirror that I had. I have no idea why I had a dollhouse mayor, and I glued it right to the inside.
Of my door, and did you catch a spider?
No? I put a I wrote a sign above it that said spiders must be smaller than this mirror, denied entry.
Did it work?
I think?
So? Oh, maybe that's what I should have done instead of, you know, just having this horrible incompatibility that I'm having. But I would need like a really really tiny, tiny mirror because all them, yeah and I are not compatible. But you know who I am compatible with is our guests?
Is it Caitlin? It's Caitlin Hi, Caitlin.
Hi, Caitlyn Kayln, you can. You can infest my house anytime you want.
Oh my gosh, and I don't have eight legs.
Or that we know of that, not with that attitude. You don't. Oh true, get yourself a hack song. No one said they have to be attached.
You know what, You're right in that case, I have dozens of legs. Yeah, that centipede was so big, so big.
So today. Caitlin Durante's our guest.
Hi, Caitlin, Hi, Kaitln, Hello, thanks for having me back.
Yeah, Sophie's our producer.
Hi, Sophie, I'm traumatized.
Hello. Ian is our audio, Hi Ian yay Ian Hi Ian Hi Un woman wrote our theme song. And this is part three of our deep and meandering dive into the Surrealists, the art movement that didn't see itself as an art movement that was cool as hell and gay as hell and anti fascist as hell. Normally, I could be like, oh, I'll catch you up with exactly where we're at in the plot. But we're doing it meandering,
We're doing it surrealistly. Last time, I called these episodes a drive, which comes from the situationists who followed the Surrealists in their footsteps right, although they like to argue about it and they got in all these fights when they overlapped. It was fun, but that's not what we're gonna talk about today. But instead I was like, maybe
this isn't a jerief. Maybe it is a different, other fancy word for Margaret has adhd, And this episode is a perfect excuse to revel in that because it's about surrealists. That word is the exquisite corpse, speaking of having too many limbs that aren't attached to people. Kate Len, are you familiar with the exquisite corpse? I am not even a little bit. Okay, it has nothing to do with its name. Okay, they're fucking surrealists.
Wait, exquisite corpse. Yeah, I'll explain it, okay, please Yeah.
Or in French it would be called a cadavre EXI, but I don't speak French besides one bag at please, I'm sorry, I don't speak French, which is what I said every day all you need to know about a month in France, and that's what I used to get around that.
And Spanish nice, which I also used Spanish because a woman I spoke to who didn't speak English, but spoke Spanish, and I spoke enough Spanish to be able to tell her where the bathroom was at the bar, that I was doing a comedy show at Excellent.
All you need that and baguettes.
All you need is bread.
Okay. So the Exquisite Corpse is something between a party game and a method of creating collaborative art. I've only played it as a party game, but it's done by people who like actually draw well. And then it's coole as fuck's realist.
Start.
You ever played the party game where you like start drawing at the top of the piece of paper and then you fold it so only the little two lines are showing, and then hand it to the next person.
It sounds familiar, but I don't think i've actually played. Maybe I've just observed.
Okay, it's really fun. That's the game of Exquisite Corpse. You draw something at the top of the piece of paper, you fold it so only the very very edge of what you draw is visible. The next person continues that little bit, and since they're starting with the connecting lines from the previous person, the things are like completely unrelated,
but they line up, you know. And sometimes you'll start by being like all right, we're drawing a person, you know, So there's like some semblance of creating a form, but other times you don't. You have a thing that starts off as a clouds, and then it's an elephant, and then it's the abyss. I don't know. You can also do it with writing. You can write a sentence and then the first word of the next sentence or paragraph where only the last line is visible or whatever, and.
It's okay, that's I think that's the version I'm more familiar with.
Yeah, when you hang out with sober people, this is the kind of thing that they get up to when they are at a party because there's no other social lubricant available. I guess I don't know. It's true.
Alcohol is the only thing that you need just together, I said, drunkenly. No, I'm not stone, I'm not drunk at this moment.
Congrets you so okay. The strange name, the Exquisite Corpse, it just comes from one of the first times they played it, which they played it as a written game for a while, and it generated the sentence the Exquisite Corpse will drink the new wine and like these are a bunch of like bastard countercultural rich kids, right, mostly so they're convinced they've unlocked like the secrets of the universe with this game, right, and so they give it
this grandiose name, but it's really fun. Most of them claim it was invented in nineteen twenty five, with like there's like lists where it's like the five specific guys, all guys were there when the Exquisite Corpse was generated by our unconscious genius or whatever. Later someone was like, nah, we've been playing this game since nineteen eighteen, well, and which you know just doesn't line up as well to like clout chasing basically.
Sure.
So the surrealists are usually presented as if there's this like clean cut line in the sand where like there's like no surrealism, and then in nineteen twenty four of their surrealism, right, there's like a before and after of the creation of surrealism. And this is not the case. The word surrealism actually comes from some theat or stuff that I didn't write down the details of because it seemed like a tangent that my brain couldn't handle at
that particular moment. But it and it wasn't even like the founders of surrealism who necessarily coined that phrase. Right, It developed organically and it wasn't named. It wasn't like being like, all right, what we're doing is surrealism until they'd been doing the thing for a while, which is a thing that I keep running across whenever there's like a cool radical subculture, like they're just like doing that shit, and then someone's like, oh they're the hippies. Oh they're
the nihilists. Oh they're the surrealists, you know.
Yeah, like oh what do we call this? Yeah, thing that's been around for a while. Yeah, yeah, totally, which makes me wonder about all of them. Right, are all things like that? Like was punk like that?
And I don't know.
Maybe, I mean, how long did this podcast exist before you started calling it cool people who did.
Stuff about immediately?
Oh okay, well there goes that theory.
Well that's not entirely true. For a while, we kept accidentally calling it cool people did cool things.
I've also made that mistake.
Yeah, we also called it cool people did cool shit. And then we were like, oh, that'll get jio, that'll get blocked on all the apps. So that's cool.
Yeah, that's what I pitched as cool shit yeah, and one time I was like, oh, I actually pitched it as a different name and people were like, oh, is it called based? People did base stuff and I was like, no, I am old like it.
It's meant to be.
Yeah, wait, what does base mean? I'm also old.
It means cool.
It means cool.
My gosh. Since when ah gen z Yeah, yeah, I can't keep up.
No, and it's okay that don't have to. Every generation can have its own slang.
Yeah.
I think I included the word stan as a verb in this script for the first time ever, and I'm going to feel extra self conscious when I use it. But so it goes. So we're going to talk about the build up. We've already talked about a bunch of things they did and a bunch of a bunch of the people who inspired them, But there is like a direct lineage that they basically come out of data and the I'm going to I had this whole pitch where it's like we're going to connect piece by piece with
smooth transitions of different subject matter to create an exquisite corpse. Oh, there's a million histories of surrealism. Most of them focus on their art, which makes sense. They focused mostly on their art, right, but only mostly, Like I'd say it
was like a fifty one percent art thing. You know, I'm going to focus a bit more on how they wove into the rest of the world and their connections because maybe we're all part of an exquisite corpse, a history where every piece has its connections to every other piece.
Oh so a question about exquisite corpse game. So when you're playing it with like a drawing, let's say, so it keeps getting passed on and you fold the paper, and so the idea is that, like what was the original thing and how does it compare to what the fit like the last person drew, or like how do what's the.
So it's less like a game a telephone. No, there's no objective. It's it's to create something out of the unconscious.
And there's like other ones that are actually like there's a really fun one where you want the first person just like writes a sentence describing something, and then the next person just can see that sentence and then draws it and then folds it where they can't see the sentence they came before it, and so then the next person writes a sentence describing that piece, and then the next person draws it et cetera, et cetera.
Down the line.
Okay, yeah, and that it's it's actually really interesting because it's both a party game and it also just like actually makes really cool art. There's a bunch of really no other times I did it? Did it ever create cool art? But I've seen really cool art that was made this way.
Hmm. Okay, nice, And I'm sure, look, don't sell yourself short. I'm sure you made amazing art.
What's funny is I've like literally published a comic book, but I like never talk about it.
Yeah, you should talk about it.
It's called the Super Happy and Erco Fun Book. And I used to draw this comic strip when I was like a traveling punk who lived out of a backpack, where it's like stick figure punks being annoying. Anyway, everyone, can you?
Is it purchaseable?
I think so. I maybe it's probably it's like one of those things where it's like probably like technically in print, but I'm willing to bet the publisher doesn't like actually keep up with it very well. You know, that's very punk. Yeah, all of that kind of an annoying way. But okay, but the next thing we're gonna talk about is the punk is thing. Ever, I don't know it's really punk. There's a lot of things that are really punk, but this is one of them. We're gonna talk about data.
We heard of data.
I've heard of it, but I know very little.
Yeah that it makes sense. That is fucking cool, and it's basically the thing that came immediately before the surrealists, and like most of the family and Surrealists were dataists before that.
Okay, so.
Okay to delay the scene for it in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, everything is like fucking wild for Europeans and most of the world. Everything is changing quickly. You have industrialization and capitalism being like, hell, yea, let's do this thing. But you also got the working class being like, no, we're gonna do our fucking thing instead, right.
You get all these people organizing into labor movements, and you get all these people dreaming of a future without the state or capitalism, and a lot of them are using like all this new science to be like, oh my god, we can you know, have our fully automated gay luxury space, Communism or whatever you know, and they tended to disagree about the methods of how to create a society without the state and capitalism. But that was like a lot of people's fucking idea. The present was
really bleak, but the future was really bright. Was kind of a one way to understand that part of labor movement. Then World War One came and said, no, the future sucks. It's all murder, everything's bad. Machine guns are here. You're fucked. World War one came and it smashed all those dreamers into little pieces because the state plus machine gun meant death everywhere, and the youth were mowed down. The stragglers who crawled home from the trenches were forever changed, and
mostly not in good ways. And this dramatically shifts the art and social scenes of Europe. And this is a bit of an exaggeration coming from an author I read just talking about like utopianism is kind of like on the wane, right, people are a little bit like we care about our bright and bold future we're marching towards and it's more like decadence, a nihilism, and a fucket attitude. This is where you get like Weimar Germany and all
the cabarets. This is when you get like, let's drink and be merry because we have no fucking food, but we seem to have all this booze and like, let's just fucking go, you know. So it's a really good time for art and culture. Eh. It kind of feels a lot like today, where climate change has us fully aware that all of the progressive things that everyone was working towards don't mean shit unless we have a real sudden revolution. Yeah, totally, but it's made really good art. Yeah,
like this podcast, which is totally high art. I absolutely, oh the highest.
Yeah.
So this did not mean an end to revolt in a desire for change, but it meant it was more concerned with the destruction of the existent rather than the prefiguration of something new. And to quote a more modern slogan that comes from the same urge, life is ecstatic intercourse between destruction and creation and not really I know. Yeah, it was not a good time to be alive in the inner wary years, but it was a good time for art and culture. All the old rules are gone,
anything could come in its place. Enter data, which actually started in the middle of the First World War, and there's a whole bunch of like modernism and avant garde and stuff. Data Unsurrealism are just examples of it, but they're like the ones I'm talking about today. Yeah, Data was an art movement against art movements. They were an anti art movement that was like a stated thing. Their goal was the quote ruthless violation of the traditional conventions
of art. They wanted to fight the logic and carefully ordered rules of modern capitalist, nationalist and war mongerin society. And they wanted to do that fighting with nonsense and the irrationality. And they did it with every medium of
art they could. So they made really weird shit, and it's like it didn't last as long, right, because it's not as like pleasant, right, Like surrealism is like even though it's like fucking weird, you're like, oh, it's like there's like nice colors and shit, you know, right, it's.
Like aesthetically pleasing. Yes, once again, I am doing a Google image search for data art.
What do you get? Is it a lot of graphic design.
It's a lot of design's.
Do you get the toilet, the journal, We'll talk about the journal.
There's like a lot of like what just seems like a collage.
Like, can't even tell you how much my APR history teacher talked about that fucking toilet.
I actually, I'm gonna be really curious when we get to that part to ask what your a p English teacher said about it. But yeah, like they, yeah, they speaking of trauma. Let's bring up about it.
And I used to get in trouble for talking in class.
Just pretend she's a giant spider he of course. Yeah. The only way I had passed Art history once I learned that my art history teacher really liked the Rococo and was complain about how none of her students liked Rococo. So it was the only period I studied. And then I wrote my paper on it, and then I was like, I'm a horrible person. I basically was just like, oh, I really struggle with this class, obviously, but I really
liked Rococo. It totally spoke to me. And she was like, oh my god, me too, and she gave me a passing grade.
That's the way you hustled, Yeah, work smarter not yeah.
Yeah, all right, so data. No one agrees where the name comes from, it's possible. The most common version of the story is that someone opened up a dictionary at random and stabbed down a knife into the French word for hobby horse. Maybe it's maybe they used it because it's a child's first word, you know, like and it's
like sort of nonsense word. Yeah, or a lot of Romanians in Switzerland were a big part of the starting of it, and so when they kept saying like yes, yes, they were saying da da Right, maybe the creators intentionally lied about where it comes from. I think that's the most likely answer.
Sounds like a very data thing to do.
Yeah, exactly. Data was basically founded by this couple, a man and a woman. So history, of course, only remembers the man, who by all accounts was actually pretty good to his partner. So here's to the wife guys of history, and they start off their journey here as anarchists, probably anarchists pacifists. Their name are names are Hugo Ball and
Emmy Hennings. Hugo was a German born into the conserv into a conservative Catholic family living in Belgium, and he saw firsthand what machine guns do to people, Belgium being one of the first places that the like mass casualties of machine guns of white people because spoiler not spoiler, a thing that happened and of course is the first use of machine guns. And war was like against indigenous
people in Africa that I'm aware of. I don't know whatever. Anyway, he saw this and he had a quote, the war is founded on a glaring mistake. Men have been confused with machines. Basically, it's like, wait, what like this is dumb? Machines should fight it out? Why are people fighting it out? They die? Like they all die. That seems bad, right, right, So the war's going on. So he fucks off to Switzerland with Emmy, who I think might be the one who got him into anarchism and shit, though don't quote
me on it. She was a cabaret dancer and she was a year older than him and had already been married and was publishing poems in radical like lefty newspapers. And they're in their like late twenties at this point. They're like, all right, you gotta eat the fuck out. We're going to Switzerland. They go to Zurich and they show up and they're starving artists. They're trying to scrape by.
They're working on all these different shows and shit. As performers or writers or whatever, and this is a really interesting place to be because like everyone who's fleeing the war, like all the all the radicals who are like being persecuted by their governments for being pacifists or being against
the war whatever, are all coming here. Right. So nineteen sixteen they start Cabaret Voltaire and soon they have all these artists in their orbit, and they start a magazine too, and they name it Cabaret Voltaire, which is fine, Like it's not like the most original thing to give it the same name, but whatever, I would probably do.
That creativity is hard, I know.
It is, and they're putting all of it into their cabaret because their cabaret is fucking weird. Like when I think of a cabaret, I think of like, well, I probably mostly think of the movie Cabaret, right, and I think about like these like very structured like here's these people performing for this specific audience and like, you know, I don't know whatever. This cabaret was a venue for poetry, dance, and music, and people tried all kinds of avantcar shit.
There were poems without words known in any language, people reading poems at the same time as one another. There's like noise scenes stuff like people playing concerts with typewriters and rakes all the shit that's like kind of cool and kind of annoying, you know an equal.
Okay, sure, prodo stomp.
It sounds like, yeah, stomp is the commercialization of of of noise, Okay, which is fine. I mean there's actually whatever speaking of the commercialization of radical culture. Wow, did you know that this show is actually sponsored?
I did?
Oh not your first write.
Sorry, I'll try again. I did not tell me more.
Well, if you want to know more, you can listen to these things that I wholeheartedly and earnestly support. And we're back. So there's people wearing all kinds of weird ridiculous outfits, doing strange dances and shit like there's a picture of like Hugo Ball and like a machine robot costume that's like cheesy as shit, looks kind of like the Tin Man like. And there's a a riotous crowd.
It's not people nodding along quietly. It's not like, oh, I'm going to go perform, everyone better be quiet while I read my poem. That is not the vibe here. One poet apparently like to punctuate his speaking by shooting a gun into the air. WHOA, I'm sure the owners of the club fucking love that.
Yeah, sounds a bit dangerous.
The word data is on a banner by the piano, and it's basically they're like, what if we just do chaos right? And part of their efforts at anti colonialism wouldn't read right in today's eyes, which is that they had to have like African drumming and like African inspired war masks as part of the decorations, although they were also actively supporting African anti colonial movements.
And I think that, okay, so appropriating some like part of it is appropriation, and part of it it's like, but we support.
Yeah, it's like militant support. And I don't fucking know, Like, I don't. I think this is a good example of like not necessarily holding people to the same standards because things were different, not even like, oh we've learned more now, it's just like literally the way that people would have interacted with all of those things could have been very different or not. I don't know. Also it's possible, yeah exactly.
We'll speak for yourself, but you know, there's also all these like It's also possible that the war Masks are actually Romanian folklore inspired, depending on the what source you read. I'd put money that they do both. A fucking ton of the people involved at the start are Romanian Jews in exile, and sometimes the shows turn into riots or cause other scandals, and the cops were like, not fans of Cabaret Voltaire. So it's just a punk club. It's just a fucking coolest shit.
Yeah, it's cool.
The cops don't like.
It, Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So Hugo Ball writes the first Data Manifesto in nineteen sixteen, and he like reads it out at the club because of course he does. And one of the lines in it, to sort of give you a sense of the sort of whatever, quote, how can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism? Worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, You're peanized and never ated by saying dada. Dada is the word soul. Data is the pawn shop. Dada is
the world's best lily milk soap. Basically, it's like, I'm going to spew nonsense because I am sick of the capitalist world is obsessed with everything being like neat and orderly. We are going to just like throw everything into chaos until something better comes along. All the while, Hugo, Hugo, Ball not Boss. I don't know how you, Hugo Boss.
Thought it the entire time you were saying Ball. I thought Boss the entire time, even though I know it was wrong. It was like, Hugo, one's a Nazi, One's not a Nazi.
Yeah, uh huh yeah. All the while, Hugo is obsessed with Catholic mysticism, Supposedly, at the same time as he's like sticking the knife into the dictionary and coming up with the word data, he's like building an altar in the corner of his room. Interesting, and their whole thing is against rationalism. In the art world, they're against aesthetics. Now we can talk about the urinal Marcel Duchamp, who is, aw yeah, one of the early Dadaists and later Surrealist.
He gets into the ready made, which is basically, you take a mass produced object, you give it a title, and you're like, here you go, here's your fucking art.
Do you do you know the story behind Fountain?
Tell me the story behind Fountain.
Okay. Fountain is the piece that everybody calls the urinal. It's an upside down yurinal where he just signed it our period mutt with the year and I think it was nineteen seventeen. Somebody can found check me if I'm wrong. Sorry. And there was this art competition that was like you can submit anything, and that's what he and he submitted it anonymously and everybody freaked the fuck out and it like changed all of art because it was like, what is art? Is this art? Can we define this as art?
And everybody lost their goddamn minds.
It's cool. Yeah, no, it's really cool to me. Yeah, And like apparently they didn't put it into the main show. They were like, this is not fucking art, but they they did photographics. Well they thought they thought it was a joke at first. Yeah. Yeah. Well but here's the thing I'm trying to figure out is that like everything I had read about it, like art history wise, which is again I clearly have laid out that I did not pay much attention to art history.
I've clearly laid out that I that I did. I knew that I knew that story off the cuffin right, and it wasn't talking too much in class.
So there's like one way of interpreting it where it's like whoa man, Like everything is art, that's so deep. And then there's another way that seems more realistic to me, which is that he was being like it's trolling. It's like, fuck you, fuck your art world. Here's a fucking urinal. I'm calling it fountain. Fucking deal with it, you know. And it might be both right, Like it might be like, look, everything's art, nothing's art, dunam you know.
It could be could be something that I did in school sometimes where I was like, oops, this project's due and I didn't do anything for it, so I'll just slap the thing on another thing that's already a thing and then pretend like I'm a genius.
Yeah, but maybe you were genius, Caitlyn, and maybe I was.
Yeah, maybe I was.
The real genius was the thing that came up from your own conscience as you were trying to evade the rules. So sadly, this concept and lots of anti art and surrealism were later recuperated into capitalism, like by that asshole Andy Warhol, who basically did the same thing but for capitalism instead of against capitalism. But data along the way.
They're also against nationalism and colonialism. They figure that these two things are the cause of war, and above everything else there against war, right, And soon it spreads this like fucking wild punk scene. The original club gets shut down, I think by the cops after like, I don't know, six months. It does not last, it does not last a very long time, but data goes across the Western world, and Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, the two people who
opened Cabaret Voltaire, they're out. Depending on the source, they stuck around with the movement for a few more months to a few more years, but basically I think they were like, oh my god, fucking art movement, we've become the thing we've hated, and we're out. But by nineteen twenty they've reconverted to like traditional Catholicism, and Hugo spends the rest of his short life obsessed with theology and Christian mysticism and now the obsessive rationalism that he's fighting against.
He's still against rationalism, but he's against the He now blames it on the Protestant Reformation. Right, he fucking loses it.
I was just like, what, I don't understand it.
I mean, I understand it, but it's not good, you know, right?
Yeah, I did not see that coming. No, but good for him, Yeah, I guess.
He died of cancer, super young, at forty one years old. Emmy lasted decades longer. But Data goes on without them. Right. In nineteen eighteen, a Jewish Romanian who had been there since more or less the beginning. His name is Tristan Zara. He writes a new Data manifesto, and he goes on to lead the movement. He helps it spread, and he's the one who brought it to all the folks who are going to go on to start the surrealist movement. Now,
Dada had an ideological fight with another art movement. I'm guessing, based on your knowledge of surrealism and Data, you're not super familiar with futurism.
I'm really not you be correct, Sophie.
What you got on futurism?
I don't have much on futurism, to be honest with you. Is there another name for it?
No, this is a futurist movement. The reason it falls out of favor of history is that they were really into the Nazis after a while.
Oh, that's probably why I don't know about it as much.
Yeah, there's what is what does the style look like? It's like Metropolis, the movie Metropolis. Like it's like it's like we're gonna go into this bright, beautiful future where the machines are like work for us, and like it's like lots of like city scapes and shit.
Mm hmmm.
Right, and bright colors looks almost like a collage. But then am I remember is that what that is? I just think I just don't know the name.
Oh see, I just think of Metropolis so much that I'm actually now got to look up futurism art. See, I know more about the politics of everything. Like at one point, yeah, I know, you're right, bright colors and shit. I was walking around this bookstore with my mom and I was like telling her all the politics of all the authors, and my mom was like, you know these books are about and I'm like, no.
No way, I did I remember. I remember.
Some of this stuff.
I just didn't know it was called futurism.
Yeah, so.
Maybe I was busy talking in class.
That was one of the days that you were just yapping those gums, flapping those gums.
See. When I was in art school, I had this roommate, and he was a He wrote a neo futurist manifesto and it was like super hierarchical, and then I got really into anarchy and we got into these like fistfights about it, and then in the end he became an anarco futurist, where it was like all of the same concept but instead it was like a galitarian m hmm, well a similar thing happened before that, where so the futures didn't start off Nazis, right, there's actually like interesting
ideological shit going on with the futurists, but they eventually most of them are like a bunch of Nazis, and so the Dadasts are like fuck you, like you suck, and overall that kind of win this fight, like Dada is remembered and futurism is more of a footnote, you know.
There however, were a bunch of people involved in Data who ended up not so good, including one Italian guy who sided with the Dadists I think in the fight against the futurists, because the futurism mostly comes from Italy, like fascism, okay.
And.
There's someone who was personal friends with Zara who turned out to be really no good, and his name is Julievola. Julius Evola is like he's like the mysticism guy that all the Nazis are into. He's the like if you meet like people who are like into weird esoteric shit where they think they're really deep and they're fucking fascists. Avola is there, like guy, okay, gross, like fuck the modern world, but not in a cool way where like we're equal and live with nature, but instead in some
fucking weird way of being Nazis. That's my Julius Vola quote. It's direct quote.
Yeah, yeah, verbatim.
I did the translation myself. I'm not great at Italian, but I feel pretty confident.
Yeah no, that sounds right.
Yeah. So Avola took the anti rationalism of data and instead of being like therefore freedom, he was like therefore fascism. And we're not gonna deep dive him because he's not a cool person did cool stuff. He's a bad but weird person who did bad but oddly banal stuff.
Okay, that should well spinoff podcast where is it.
Bad people did odd but banal stuff?
Yeah?
I bet I Yeah, I'm not doing a trilogy.
Anyway. Fuck that guy. Zara the cool one. By nineteen nineteen, he leaves Switzerland to go hang because the war's over and shit right, he goes go hang out with the cool Paris dotsts who are like having the most fun maybe and they and they start publishing a magazine with fucking dog shit name. Literature is the name of their magazine because they'll pretentious this fight. I hate it. Don't name your magazine literature.
Sorry, that sounds so bass, you know, Oh yeah no, totally yeah, yeah we stan we stan literature, yeah, but dead ass Yeah.
By doing it there we.
Go probably say it with some there is.
Wait, I don't know, I've never heard that one.
That's fine, it's it's what it's what jen, it's what the youth use to shorten charisma. They call it the person has riz.
All right, all right, I mean that is creative.
That has been words My much uger, much cooler employees have taught me.
Is compared to me, You're like older employer is like I can tell you all about the drama in nineteen twenty, and I don't know shit about what's happening in twenty twenty.
Listen, listen, find people who can do it all all I'm saying I need I need it all in my life because.
You're a girl boss. That's that's slang. But that's a bad one. Now you're not that, because you're you're good. Only there were a word for good, there isn't. We just use the word good. So so the pure negation of art that the Dadas were seeking soon turned into a pure negation of each other over minor differences, which will surprise no one who's hung out in a cool
as fuck punk scene. Unfortunately, soon they're publishing like hit pieces on each other being like but not like they're not like publishing hippies is on, like a vola, right, they're publishing hippiees is Onlike the way that you're interpreting your particular interpretation of leftism is not the same as mine or whatever.
Okay, So it's like Distracks basically of the nineteen twenties.
Yeah, totally and probably worse, although I don't know, I mean some of it's kind of interesting and okay. So basically you got Zara, who started off like kind of leader of the Dadas, and then you've got Andre Berton, who's going to end up the leader of the surrealists, and he calls Zara an impostor and basically a clout chaser. Also, only historians call them leaders to be clear, like the leader of it. Actually Breton might have called himself the leader,
but no, whatever, we'll get to it. He wasn't actually the leader. Breton basically calls Zara an impostor and a cloud chaser, which is probably true. The cloud chaser part. There's no way you can call Zara an impostor with data is it's like fifty to fifty. The name literally comes from him going yes, yes, in a club right this or that. Datas group started having trouble with each other, they're like, no, you're out of the club. And they're like, no,
you're out of the club. Look, I'm crossing you off the official roster. See that was your name, and now there's a line through it, you know. And so, ladies, gentlemen, and between of these, if your art movement has an official roster, you asked for it.
That is not very art. I would say, yeah, totally have a list.
And you also asked for these ads unless you have cooler zone media. If you asked for just this ad transition.
And we're back so this occasionally gets physical. One of Zara's plays gets disrupted by Breton and some furniture gets smashed and the cops end up showing up. They also like to fight about anarchism versus communism, although they all keep changing their minds about like which where they're at on any of these given spectrums, nothing ever changes. So then in nineteen twenty two, Data threw its own funeral, which I think is clisse. Hell. We're like they people,
We're done, explain like we did it. I's have a funeral for Data. Data is done, okay, which actually to make it even more punk. In nineteen eighty two or no, maybe in the seventies, Fuck, someone's gonna check my punk. Cred Crass, an anarchist punk band from the UK, release an album called Punk is Dead, and basically it was like Punk's over and it was like before punk really
even like got going. But Data throws its own funeral and the whole because the whole point it wasn't to become a shitty art movement, but they had become a shitty art movement. They're like, we're good, it's done, Dada did its thing. We all go home now. And in nineteen twenty four, when the Surrealist Manifesto comes out. It's
basically like surrealism has devoured data, which is not wrong. Okay, But before we move to surrealism, I want to follow up with Zara because he's cool and he doesn't take center stage in surrealism quite the way he doesn't Dada, mostly because Breton kind of won that fight and he's like, fuck you, you're not a real surrealist or whatever the
fucking bullshit. He was stubbornly independent. He didn't like when in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties the surrealists were like getting in with the Communist Party, and he kept getting into fights with Breton. But soon they're all having bigger problems, Nazi shape problems. By nineteen thirty three, he's like, fuck it, communism, it's better than fascism. So he retires from art promotion and he moves into anti fascist organizing.
He goes briefly over to Spain to join the en anti fascist forces in their war against Franco, which we've talked about million times in the show, and I'll talk about a little bit later in the script. And then he comes back and he organizes benefits and he puts out poetry anthologies of the world's most celebrated poets against all this fascist shit. And he's just basically like, I'm going to figure out how to leverage my art cred
to bring attention to the need to destroy fascism. And this is before World War two, right, this is when like this is one of the like before anti fashion, anti fascism went mainstream. You know, when World War II broke out, he went to southern France. The fact they didn't fuck off entirely as a communist Jew and a degenerate artist is probably testament to his courage slash partly he probably had a hard time getting out. He joined
the resistance. He fought alongside the Maqui, which of the Spanish rebels we talked about one of our episodes in the Resistance to Franco. He ran the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces pirate radio station while his son was fighting in the north of France against the fucking Nazis. And at this point, as a Jew, he stripped of his Romanian citizenship and his home country won't sell his books, right, so he is like a man without a country. Fighting
desperately alongside his son against the fascists. And at this point he's like, all right, I guess fucking I'm a communist. Right and the war ends, He's like, I guess I'm a communist. Have you ever heard of speaking of slang? Have you ever heard of people talk about tankies?
I don't think so.
Wow, we live on such different corners of the Internet. I'm kind of jealous.
The corner of the Internet I live on is looking at cat videos.
This is a better part if if, yeah, Sophie, you ever heard of tankies?
Yeah?
Yeah, So Tanky's is a pejorative for authoritarian communists, particularly Stalinists. If there's like someone online who's being like like, Iran is good because they hate the US or fucking the shitty dictator of Syria what's his fucking name?
Asad?
Asad is good because he hates the US, or Russia is good because they hate the US, right, Like, this is a tanky position. This is a position that comes from like weird old Cold war bullshit where they're like, I'm just so completely whatever, I fucking hate them because it's a nonsensical thing. Well, and it's for anyone who's attracted to the image of like state power with lots of lines of tanks and huge, big red flags and Shitay, this piece of slang actually comes from the nineteen fifties.
It only got popular in the US thanks to Twitter, which famously was not invented until sometime after the nineteen fifties. I've heard that, yeah. In nineteen fifty six, there was a huge uprising in Hungary against the Soviet Union, and it came from all different types of Hungarians, and it included a ton of leftists, including a ton of communists. Basically, the USSR is bad, which is a reasonable position because
they are right. And this basically split the communists left around the world, the people who don't live in the Soviet Union. Also, half of them, the tankies approved, they didn't call themselves as their opponents did, approved of the USSR sending in tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution. The other half, who might be called quote, people with the reasonable understanding of the human desire for freedom and also basic understanding of what communism is actually supposed to be about.
They supported the Hungarian Revolution. Zara supported the Hungarian Revolution, which is a break from the Communist Party right. He didn't entirely support it, but he supported it enough to piss off the tankies any possible, like, hey, maybe it's bad when they get murdered, is like an enough to
be like, how dare you question our supreme leader? You know? Yeah, And the Hungarian Revolution was mercilessly crushed by the authoritarian forces of the USSR, and I think this kind of breaks his heart, and he's just like, fuck it whatever, I'm staying out of public life. Everything sucks, and he just he keeps doing activism, he keeps fighting, fighting for decolonization, which is like the main issue for a lot of these people.
M h.
And then he makes it to his sixties and then he does what everyone does eventually, which is die.
A lot of these for yourself again.
Yeah no, I mean, well, I'm not speaking for myself. I was around during all this stuff. I'm gonna be around till the heat death.
Of the universe.
When I keep saying the show's gonna be around to the heat death of the universe, I mean with me as the host.
Yeah, yeah, obviously.
Yeah. It's because I grew up in the blood drinking cult Catholicism, where everyone's a vampire.
Mmmm.
That's why I have so many spare legs. I'm just sicking the blood out of them.
Yes, yeah, you slowly went from the spider to centipede to millipede.
Mm hmm.
Okay, So now we're gonna leave data and go to surrealism. What the fuck is surrealism. It's got all these notable characteristics we've talked about. It's all about the unfettered and unfiltered imagination. It's about freedom of people's bodies and minds. It's about dreams. It's about automatic writing, it's about channeled forms of expression. It's about the juxtaposition of the ordinary
until it is no longer ordinary. Basically, if data is like a fundamentally nihilist rejection of the existent, surrealism is a way to dream possible alternatives, a way to dream up and manifest the impossible. So like going back to utopianism in a way, but instead of it being kind of like we're gonna build the workers Paradise, it's a little bit more like, yes, but we're gonna do that by like living our impossible dreams, like nothing is impossible,
because reality itself is something that we can shape. I I knew, I like surrealism. And then the more I research this shit, the more I'm like, these people fucking rule. Some of them who some of the folks that started out with were some of the data folks who were med students in Paris, and they were super into art and all this shit. But they're also into all this new psychoanalysis stuff that's going around. They've been doing automatic writing and we're starting to wonder if there's more to
reality than what gets presented as reality. And they're into the idea that somewhere between the conscious and unconscious is a third thing, like the meme, Like, you know, do you want this without or do you want the secret third thing?
Mm.
The thing that they're trying to create is a surrealist revolution, a new way to find a higher reality, that space between the conscious and the unconscious. And they realize that exploitation and inequality is what's standing in the way of that. So it's not just a spiritual revolution, but a physical
material one. It's like it's like one of the things that the most of the hippies got right, but like our memory of the Hippies is a society thinks they only cared about like getting high and like opening the doors of perception or whatever, you know, right right, actually a good chunk of them. We're like, actually, we can't
do that until we like the everyone's free. But you know, they called what they were fighting for the marvelous with a capital M. And this is contrasted with its opponent, basically miserable miserableism, which also is a capital M. Okay, I want to quote a living surrealist author, Ron Skakowski. Miserableism is a system that produces misery and then rationalizes it by perpetuating the idea that such misery comprises the
only possible reality. It's basically like, oh, everything sucks, but it's just that's the.
Way it is, how it is.
Yeah, yeah, And so this to the surrealis absolutely includes the art world. The art world is part of miserableism when it all starts to kick off in nineteen twenty four, Like when they have the Surrealist Manifesto. They've been doing the ship for a while, right, but when they kind of put the name to it, it's still slightly apolitical. They had anarchist assassin heroes and shit, but they hadn't quite been Like, surrealism is revolution in a literal sense,
this only lasted a couple months. The inciting incident was the Riff War, which was this anti colonial uprising by
the Berbers in northern Morocco. And the reason it's interesting to me is that like we tend to think of white Europeans as only caring about white europe you know, m h. But like radicals at the time were absolutely paying attention to and sometimes participants in anti colonial struggle, not as much as the Eventually, I'm hoping I'll do a whole thing on the Riftwar and a bunch of these anti colonial revolutions, But like, basically, the Berbers in
northern Morocco are like, all right, we're getting rid of this fucking government, the colonial government. We're gonna get rid of the Spanish right, and they've been fighting against the Spanish for several years. But by nine teen twenty five they attacked French colonial holdings too, because France also was
stealing a bunch of their shit. In two weeks, they drove the French out of forty of their sixty six military bases and killed, injured or captured twenty percent of the French forces in the region, which is they are like outnumbered and outgunned substantially, and they're just like fucking kicking ass.
Yeah.
But the problem here is that France and Spain were quite excited to get willing, quite willing to put aside their differences and work together to smash this rebellion. And they had the numbers and the guns, and they put down the uprising by nineteen twenty six. But along the way, the Surrealists are like, we fucking like these people, the
marvelous demands. We fight miserableism with guns if need be, or to quote them more directly, quote we Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favor of changing the imperialist war in its
chronic and colonial form into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution of the proletariat and its struggles, and to find our attitude towards the colonial problem and hence towards the color question, which I really like the like, oh, yeah, this imperialist war whatever becomes a fucking civil war, huh fuck you you know, which they didn't pull off, right, but like most people don't.
Yeah.
And it means that the Surrealists started off as an explicitly anti racist organization. Their first specific thing was the
color question, right mm hm, And they started off okay. So, like the other thing that happened whiles researching this is that I like start off with all these like there's like the art world assumptions of everything that I had heard about surrealists, which is like Dali the only surrealist you know, and then there's the like kind of like vague Okay, they were people, and they had this politics and stuff, and it turns out most of what I learned from that was all so wrong, right, okay, Because
like one of the things that you read about is that it started off like a total boys club, but it it didn't start off as a boys club. It started with women and men both. The very first issue of the magazine, Surrealist Revolution had women and had women and men both in it. Women were left out of the press about the organization by two groups I know, and it's by the exactly the two groups you'd expect.
One the guys in the club who kind of wanted to put up a no girl's allowed sign, right, and they were like, oh no, it's us, And they're like shouldering each other out of the way to be like ah, it's all us, you know, and also by the press who just fucking ate it up and just want to
talk about boys in their paintings, you know, storing. Yeah, yeah, no, I like genuinely, I was like, oh, I'm gonna have to like fast forward through all the fucking boys club shit, and then I'm like, oh, there was like people who tried to make it a boy's club and they didn't succeed.
Okay, good.
The only people writing about women's surrealists were the surrealists, both women and men. The art critics were ignoring them, essentially until the women's liberation movement in the sixties and seventies, when suddenly you start having people go back in history and be like, oh, actually, there was literally hundreds of women involved in all of their fucking art exhibits, like, you know, like every every step of the way. M hm, one kind of wow.
Women exist and did things.
Yeah, they weren't just muses. And one of the problems that surrealist had is that they put women on pedestals and would be like, the women is the most beautiful, perfect thing, and blah blah blah, we need muses or whatever, and then these like women would be like, I'm not your fucking muse, I'm an artist who And then like most of them, men were like, oh that's cool, oh interesting, Yeah you don't say I know. Some of them are
probably like, no, never mind, you're not fun anymore. I can't wait you speak have thoughts, yeah, leave me alone. Or they'd be like, yes, I want your unfiltered, chaotic womanly thoughts. Just I get to be.
The one to write them down, rolling my eyes.
Yeah. One commenter who was quoted in the book Surrealist Women pointed out quote, no comparable movement outside of specifically feminist organizations has had such a high proportion of active women participants, and the ignoring of these women surrealists actually ties into the misreading of Surrealism that mainstream society has
that is just the painters. This, of course, was actively perpetuated in the US by veteran enemy of the pod solid Or Dali, who once said, I know this is he obviously had his even worse quotes, but this one's not great. He wants a talent to store it in
the balls. This guy saw it really sucks so bad, and so he was like, he wrote that about like a specific I forgot to write there's like a specific woman where he was like, I guess she's all right for a girl, but no girl can be truly fantastic, because you know, talent is stored in the balls or whatever. Oh my god, which is why you have that talisman of balls They castrated off of men the only way to.
Yeah, it's like, okay, all your talent is and your balls, well then what if I kick them?
Yeah? Yeah, you know, And so most of the women are sorry. More of the women were more likely to be writers, especially poets, but also theorists. But there's also a ton of painters and photographers too. Literally hundreds of women were part of the surrealist movement in his heyday.
And the surrealist historian I've gotten the most out of during my research in these episodes is Penelope Rosemont, and she stresses that Surrealism has been mis presented by the press and turned into a drama of like splits and purges that represent Andre Breton as an authoritarian leader. Penelope says about this, from its first day, Surrealism as an
organized movement was itself a free association. She says that even the surrealists who like left angry still described it as a free community which practiced collective decision making and encouraged the active participation of all. It saw itself not as a style of art, but a community of ethical views. So it's like, Okay, if you're trying to create the marvelous, you're one of us.
You know.
That said. Some of the participants of early surrealism were absolutely all about the drama and splits and all about gaykeeping and all about like sitting there and crossing off names and be like, no, you're not see you got crussed off. And we'll talk about that, but only a little bit because it's less interesting to me than their lives and what they fought for, which we'll get into you on Wednesday.
Wow, I can't wait.
Well you, I was gonna say you have to, but you actually don't have to. Everyone else has to.
But we're going right into this, I.
Know, only after we first hear about you, Haylen.
It's me. I am someone who also hosts a podcast which you can listen to if you want. It's called the Bechdel Cast, and we talk about movies and examine them through an intersectional feminist lens. And by we I mean myself and I co host Jamie Loftis, and usually I just you know, it's oh gosh, it's a hoot. I talk more so, I feel like I've been very quiet today. I my COVID brain fog is at an all time high.
Congrats right now, sorry.
And thank you so much. But you know, on this next episode, I just need a drink of water, I think, and then I'm going to be so I'm going to be saying so many brilliant things. And yeah, also follow me on Instagram. I don't know, it doesn't matter, Okay, the end.
I have a project that's probably kickstarting when this is released, but I can't remember all the details about schedules of either part of it, both the kickstarter or this show nice and so it's either going to happen soon or happening now or already happened. But either way, you can still get this thing I'm writing. I'm doing like world building writing for a board game called Defenders of the Wild from Outlandish Games, and it has a companion role
playing game book. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. It's like a by the makers of Block by Block, which is like a game of a board game of Revolt but this one is like you can be like a fox with the bow and arrow fighting against machines that are trying to enclose all the land and like kill all the animals and like whoa, it's really fun and I'm helping develop the role playing game world alongside a really incredible team of people, and it's like super profession
like super cool and good. And you can check it out by searching Defenders of the Wild Outlandish Games, and you can sign up for information about it, or it's already happening and you can back it, or it already happened, and you can probably still buy it or convince someone else to buy it so you can come over to their house and play it. Because how can you call yourself polyamorous if you don't have a board game night. This is not true. I actually don't have a board
game night. Well I guess I do have a role playing game.
I actually kind of do.
Oh nice.
I have some friends. We almost exclusively play Catan. Okay, but for now, for now, yes, until I get my grubby little fingers on your game.
Hell yeah, Sophie, what do you got ah?
Cooler Zone Media, Cool Zone Media at cool Zone Media, cool Zonmedia dot com.
What about Coolest Zone Media. I'm stealing a joke from James Stout.
We haven't invented that yet, but it's coming.
So many new things. We've got Coolest Zone Media on the horizon. We've got bad people who did what was it called again something banal?
Yeah, bad people who did bad things. The Julius Vola podcast mm hmmmm, Great Edge Lords of History. Huh. I actually don't want to host that or listen to.
It, but I don't want to hear anything about it.
I decline the It's not dream Lit, Not not Not on Red Light Boom podcast over Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.