Review:
Surrealism and the Occult
by Nadia Choucha
140 pages with photos, £8.99
available from Mandrake
PO Box 250,
Oxford OX1 1AP
Such a book could not appear in France. The relation between art and the
occult is something that has been long recognised in French culture. It
is the prudery of the British cultural establishment which makes Surrealism
and the Occult stand out.
The book's value lies in the fact that it collates information about the
overlap between Art and occultism from Symbolism to Surrealism. Many links
have been dug out through looking at primary sources. But the book does
not go further than this.
Those familiar with the work of Francis Yates will be familiar with neo-platonism,
which lies at the root of much western occultism. This was a prime factor
in renaissance Art and science. This occult shadow has never been far away
from Western Art - we would argue that this has been a structural necessity.
Surrealism and the Occult provides useful evidence in support of this, even
if Nadia Choucha prefers to maintain universal essentialism at a theoretical
level. Choucha does not question 'Art' as a social construct of capitalist
society, nor the social basis of the occult 'revival' of the nineteenth
century. She loses sight of the fact that surrealism attempted to overthow
existing social conditions:
"The cause of the ideological failure of surrealism was
its belief that the unconscious was the finally discovered ultimate force
of life. (...) We now know that the unconscious imagination is poor, that
automatic writing is monotonous, and that the whole genre of ostentatious
surrealist 'weirdness' has ceased to be very surprising. The formal fidelity
to this style of imagination ultimately leads back to the antipodes of the
modern conditions of imagination: back to traditional occultism."
(Report on the Construction of Situations . . . Guy Debord June 1957
p; this was a text for the founding conference of the Situationist
International).
Return to ELPAN No.3
Return to LPA Home Page