Speaker 1: Whole Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to cool spiders that infest Sophie's basement
Speaker 2: with the occasional centipede house centipedes. Ideally, I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Margaret Kiljoy, and today we are not talking about bugs,
Speaker 2: not talking.
Speaker 1: About my current trauma.
Speaker 2: Nope, I'm really allergic to spider bites.
Speaker 1: I don't hate them as a concept, but spiders and
Speaker 1: mer are not compatible.
Speaker 2: My first real viral post on Instagram was at my
Speaker 2: old cabin. I had this like tiny dollhouse mirror that
Speaker 2: I had. I have no idea why I had a
Speaker 2: dollhouse mayor, and I glued it right to the inside.
Speaker 1: Of my door, and did you catch a spider?
Speaker 2: No? I put a I wrote a sign above it
Speaker 2: that said spiders must be smaller than this mirror, denied entry.
Speaker 1: Did it work?
Speaker 2: I think?
Speaker 1: So? Oh, maybe that's what I should have done instead of,
Speaker 1: you know, just having this horrible incompatibility that I'm having.
Speaker 1: But I would need like a really really tiny, tiny
Speaker 1: mirror because all them, yeah and I are not compatible.
Speaker 1: But you know who I am compatible with is our guests?
Speaker 2: Is it Caitlin? It's Caitlin Hi, Caitlin.
Speaker 1: Hi, Caitlyn Kayln, you can. You can infest my house
Speaker 1: anytime you want.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, and I don't have eight legs.
Speaker 2: Or that we know of that, not with that attitude.
Speaker 2: You don't. Oh true, get yourself a hack song. No
Speaker 2: one said they have to be attached.
Speaker 3: You know what, You're right in that case, I have
Speaker 3: dozens of legs. Yeah, that centipede was so big, so big.
Speaker 2: So today. Caitlin Durante's our guest.
Speaker 3: Hi, Caitlin, Hi, Kaitln, Hello, thanks for having me back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Sophie's our producer.
Speaker 1: Hi, Sophie, I'm traumatized.
Speaker 2: Hello. Ian is our audio, Hi Ian yay Ian Hi
Speaker 2: Ian Hi Un woman wrote our theme song. And this
Speaker 2: is part three of our deep and meandering dive into
Speaker 2: the Surrealists, the art movement that didn't see itself as
Speaker 2: an art movement that was cool as hell and gay
Speaker 2: as hell and anti fascist as hell. Normally, I could
Speaker 2: be like, oh, I'll catch you up with exactly where
Speaker 2: we're at in the plot. But we're doing it meandering,
Speaker 2: We're doing it surrealistly. Last time, I called these episodes
Speaker 2: a drive, which comes from the situationists who followed the
Speaker 2: Surrealists in their footsteps right, although they like to argue
Speaker 2: about it and they got in all these fights when
Speaker 2: they overlapped. It was fun, but that's not what we're
Speaker 2: gonna talk about today. But instead I was like, maybe
Speaker 2: this isn't a jerief. Maybe it is a different, other
Speaker 2: fancy word for Margaret has adhd, And this episode is
Speaker 2: a perfect excuse to revel in that because it's about surrealists.
Speaker 2: That word is the exquisite corpse, speaking of having too
Speaker 2: many limbs that aren't attached to people. Kate Len, are
Speaker 2: you familiar with the exquisite corpse? I am not even
Speaker 2: a little bit. Okay, it has nothing to do with
Speaker 2: its name. Okay, they're fucking surrealists.
Speaker 3: Wait, exquisite corpse. Yeah, I'll explain it, okay, please Yeah.
Speaker 2: Or in French it would be called a cadavre EXI,
Speaker 2: but I don't speak French besides one bag at please,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I don't speak French, which is what I
Speaker 2: said every day all you need to know about a
Speaker 2: month in France, and that's what I used to get
Speaker 2: around that.
Speaker 3: And Spanish nice, which I also used Spanish because a
Speaker 3: woman I spoke to who didn't speak English, but spoke Spanish,
Speaker 3: and I spoke enough Spanish to be able to tell
Speaker 3: her where the bathroom was at the bar, that I
Speaker 3: was doing a comedy show at Excellent.
Speaker 2: All you need that and baguettes.
Speaker 3: All you need is bread.
Speaker 2: Okay. So the Exquisite Corpse is something between a party
Speaker 2: game and a method of creating collaborative art. I've only
Speaker 2: played it as a party game, but it's done by
Speaker 2: people who like actually draw well. And then it's coole
Speaker 2: as fuck's realist.
Speaker 3: Start.
Speaker 2: You ever played the party game where you like start
Speaker 2: drawing at the top of the piece of paper and
Speaker 2: then you fold it so only the little two lines
Speaker 2: are showing, and then hand it to the next person.
Speaker 3: It sounds familiar, but I don't think i've actually played.
Speaker 3: Maybe I've just observed.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's really fun. That's the game of Exquisite Corpse.
Speaker 2: You draw something at the top of the piece of paper,
Speaker 2: you fold it so only the very very edge of
Speaker 2: what you draw is visible. The next person continues that
Speaker 2: little bit, and since they're starting with the connecting lines
Speaker 2: from the previous person, the things are like completely unrelated,
Speaker 2: but they line up, you know. And sometimes you'll start
Speaker 2: by being like all right, we're drawing a person, you know,
Speaker 2: So there's like some semblance of creating a form, but
Speaker 2: other times you don't. You have a thing that starts
Speaker 2: off as a clouds, and then it's an elephant, and
Speaker 2: then it's the abyss. I don't know. You can also
Speaker 2: do it with writing. You can write a sentence and
Speaker 2: then the first word of the next sentence or paragraph
Speaker 2: where only the last line is visible or whatever, and.
Speaker 3: It's okay, that's I think that's the version I'm more
Speaker 3: familiar with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you hang out with sober people, this is
Speaker 2: the kind of thing that they get up to when
Speaker 2: they are at a party because there's no other social
Speaker 2: lubricant available. I guess I don't know. It's true.
Speaker 3: Alcohol is the only thing that you need just together,
Speaker 3: I said, drunkenly. No, I'm not stone, I'm not drunk
Speaker 3: at this moment.
Speaker 2: Congrets you so okay. The strange name, the Exquisite Corpse,
Speaker 2: it just comes from one of the first times they
Speaker 2: played it, which they played it as a written game
Speaker 2: for a while, and it generated the sentence the Exquisite
Speaker 2: Corpse will drink the new wine and like these are
Speaker 2: a bunch of like bastard countercultural rich kids, right, mostly
Speaker 2: so they're convinced they've unlocked like the secrets of the
Speaker 2: universe with this game, right, and so they give it
Speaker 2: this grandiose name, but it's really fun. Most of them
Speaker 2: claim it was invented in nineteen twenty five, with like
Speaker 2: there's like lists where it's like the five specific guys,
Speaker 2: all guys were there when the Exquisite Corpse was generated
Speaker 2: by our unconscious genius or whatever. Later someone was like, nah,
Speaker 2: we've been playing this game since nineteen eighteen, well, and
Speaker 2: which you know just doesn't line up as well to
Speaker 2: like clout chasing basically.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 2: So the surrealists are usually presented as if there's this
Speaker 2: like clean cut line in the sand where like there's
Speaker 2: like no surrealism, and then in nineteen twenty four of
Speaker 2: their surrealism, right, there's like a before and after of
Speaker 2: the creation of surrealism. And this is not the case.
Speaker 2: The word surrealism actually comes from some theat or stuff
Speaker 2: that I didn't write down the details of because it
Speaker 2: seemed like a tangent that my brain couldn't handle at
Speaker 2: that particular moment. But it and it wasn't even like
Speaker 2: the founders of surrealism who necessarily coined that phrase. Right,
Speaker 2: It developed organically and it wasn't named. It wasn't like
Speaker 2: being like, all right, what we're doing is surrealism until
Speaker 2: they'd been doing the thing for a while, which is
Speaker 2: a thing that I keep running across whenever there's like
Speaker 2: a cool radical subculture, like they're just like doing that shit,
Speaker 2: and then someone's like, oh they're the hippies. Oh they're
Speaker 2: the nihilists. Oh they're the surrealists, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like oh what do we call this? Yeah, thing
Speaker 3: that's been around for a while. Yeah, yeah, totally, which
Speaker 3: makes me wonder about all of them. Right, are all
Speaker 3: things like that? Like was punk like that?
Speaker 1: And I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe, I mean, how long did this podcast exist before
Speaker 3: you started calling it cool people who did.
Speaker 1: Stuff about immediately?
Speaker 3: Oh okay, well there goes that theory.
Speaker 2: Well that's not entirely true. For a while, we kept
Speaker 2: accidentally calling it cool people did cool things.
Speaker 3: I've also made that mistake.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we also called it cool people did cool shit.
Speaker 1: And then we were like, oh, that'll get jio, that'll
Speaker 1: get blocked on all the apps. So that's cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I pitched as cool shit yeah, and
Speaker 2: one time I was like, oh, I actually pitched it
Speaker 2: as a different name and people were like, oh, is
Speaker 2: it called based? People did base stuff and I was like, no,
Speaker 2: I am old like it.
Speaker 1: It's meant to be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, wait, what does base mean? I'm also old.
Speaker 2: It means cool.
Speaker 1: It means cool.
Speaker 3: My gosh. Since when ah gen z Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: can't keep up.
Speaker 2: No, and it's okay that don't have to. Every generation
Speaker 2: can have its own slang.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think I included the word stan as a verb
Speaker 2: in this script for the first time ever, and I'm
Speaker 2: going to feel extra self conscious when I use it.
Speaker 2: But so it goes. So we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: the build up. We've already talked about a bunch of
Speaker 2: things they did and a bunch of a bunch of
Speaker 2: the people who inspired them, But there is like a
Speaker 2: direct lineage that they basically come out of data and
Speaker 2: the I'm going to I had this whole pitch where
Speaker 2: it's like we're going to connect piece by piece with
Speaker 2: smooth transitions of different subject matter to create an exquisite corpse. Oh,
Speaker 2: there's a million histories of surrealism. Most of them focus
Speaker 2: on their art, which makes sense. They focused mostly on
Speaker 2: their art, right, but only mostly, Like I'd say it
Speaker 2: was like a fifty one percent art thing. You know,
Speaker 2: I'm going to focus a bit more on how they
Speaker 2: wove into the rest of the world and their connections
Speaker 2: because maybe we're all part of an exquisite corpse, a
Speaker 2: history where every piece has its connections to every other piece.
Speaker 3: Oh so a question about exquisite corpse game. So when
Speaker 3: you're playing it with like a drawing, let's say, so
Speaker 3: it keeps getting passed on and you fold the paper,
Speaker 3: and so the idea is that, like what was the
Speaker 3: original thing and how does it compare to what the
Speaker 3: fit like the last person drew, or like how do
Speaker 3: what's the.
Speaker 2: So it's less like a game a telephone. No, there's
Speaker 2: no objective. It's it's to create something out of the unconscious.
Speaker 2: And there's like other ones that are actually like there's
Speaker 2: a really fun one where you want the first person
Speaker 2: just like writes a sentence describing something, and then the
Speaker 2: next person just can see that sentence and then draws
Speaker 2: it and then folds it where they can't see the
Speaker 2: sentence they came before it, and so then the next
Speaker 2: person writes a sentence describing that piece, and then the
Speaker 2: next person draws it et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Down the line.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, and that it's it's actually really interesting because
Speaker 2: it's both a party game and it also just like
Speaker 2: actually makes really cool art. There's a bunch of really
Speaker 2: no other times I did it? Did it ever create
Speaker 2: cool art? But I've seen really cool art that was
Speaker 2: made this way.
Speaker 3: Hmm. Okay, nice, And I'm sure, look, don't sell yourself short.
Speaker 3: I'm sure you made amazing art.
Speaker 2: What's funny is I've like literally published a comic book,
Speaker 2: but I like never talk about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you should talk about it.
Speaker 2: It's called the Super Happy and Erco Fun Book. And
Speaker 2: I used to draw this comic strip when I was
Speaker 2: like a traveling punk who lived out of a backpack,
Speaker 2: where it's like stick figure punks being annoying. Anyway, everyone,
Speaker 2: can you?
Speaker 3: Is it purchaseable?
Speaker 2: I think so. I maybe it's probably it's like one
Speaker 2: of those things where it's like probably like technically in print,
Speaker 2: but I'm willing to bet the publisher doesn't like actually
Speaker 2: keep up with it very well. You know, that's very punk. Yeah,
Speaker 2: all of that kind of an annoying way. But okay,
Speaker 2: but the next thing we're gonna talk about is the
Speaker 2: punk is thing. Ever, I don't know it's really punk.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of things that are really punk, but
Speaker 2: this is one of them. We're gonna talk about data.
Speaker 2: We heard of data.
Speaker 3: I've heard of it, but I know very little.
Speaker 2: Yeah that it makes sense. That is fucking cool, and
Speaker 2: it's basically the thing that came immediately before the surrealists,
Speaker 2: and like most of the family and Surrealists were dataists
Speaker 2: before that.
Speaker 3: Okay, so.
Speaker 2: Okay to delay the scene for it in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: In the early twentieth century, everything is like fucking wild
Speaker 2: for Europeans and most of the world. Everything is changing quickly.
Speaker 2: You have industrialization and capitalism being like, hell, yea, let's
Speaker 2: do this thing. But you also got the working class
Speaker 2: being like, no, we're gonna do our fucking thing instead, right.
Speaker 2: You get all these people organizing into labor movements, and
Speaker 2: you get all these people dreaming of a future without
Speaker 2: the state or capitalism, and a lot of them are
Speaker 2: using like all this new science to be like, oh
Speaker 2: my god, we can you know, have our fully automated
Speaker 2: gay luxury space, Communism or whatever you know, and they
Speaker 2: tended to disagree about the methods of how to create
Speaker 2: a society without the state and capitalism. But that was
Speaker 2: like a lot of people's fucking idea. The present was
Speaker 2: really bleak, but the future was really bright. Was kind
Speaker 2: of a one way to understand that part of labor movement.
Speaker 2: Then World War One came and said, no, the future sucks.
Speaker 2: It's all murder, everything's bad. Machine guns are here. You're fucked.
Speaker 2: World War one came and it smashed all those dreamers
Speaker 2: into little pieces because the state plus machine gun meant
Speaker 2: death everywhere, and the youth were mowed down. The stragglers
Speaker 2: who crawled home from the trenches were forever changed, and
Speaker 2: mostly not in good ways. And this dramatically shifts the
Speaker 2: art and social scenes of Europe. And this is a
Speaker 2: bit of an exaggeration coming from an author I read
Speaker 2: just talking about like utopianism is kind of like on
Speaker 2: the wane, right, people are a little bit like we
Speaker 2: care about our bright and bold future we're marching towards
Speaker 2: and it's more like decadence, a nihilism, and a fucket attitude.
Speaker 2: This is where you get like Weimar Germany and all
Speaker 2: the cabarets. This is when you get like, let's drink
Speaker 2: and be merry because we have no fucking food, but
Speaker 2: we seem to have all this booze and like, let's
Speaker 2: just fucking go, you know. So it's a really good
Speaker 2: time for art and culture. Eh. It kind of feels
Speaker 2: a lot like today, where climate change has us fully
Speaker 2: aware that all of the progressive things that everyone was
Speaker 2: working towards don't mean shit unless we have a real
Speaker 2: sudden revolution. Yeah, totally, but it's made really good art. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like this podcast, which is totally high art. I absolutely,
Speaker 2: oh the highest.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So this did not mean an end to revolt in
Speaker 2: a desire for change, but it meant it was more
Speaker 2: concerned with the destruction of the existent rather than the
Speaker 2: prefiguration of something new. And to quote a more modern
Speaker 2: slogan that comes from the same urge, life is ecstatic
Speaker 2: intercourse between destruction and creation and not really I know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was not a good time to be alive in
Speaker 2: the inner wary years, but it was a good time
Speaker 2: for art and culture. All the old rules are gone,
Speaker 2: anything could come in its place. Enter data, which actually
Speaker 2: started in the middle of the First World War, and
Speaker 2: there's a whole bunch of like modernism and avant garde
Speaker 2: and stuff. Data Unsurrealism are just examples of it, but
Speaker 2: they're like the ones I'm talking about today. Yeah, Data
Speaker 2: was an art movement against art movements. They were an
Speaker 2: anti art movement that was like a stated thing. Their
Speaker 2: goal was the quote ruthless violation of the traditional conventions
Speaker 2: of art. They wanted to fight the logic and carefully
Speaker 2: ordered rules of modern capitalist, nationalist and war mongerin society.
Speaker 2: And they wanted to do that fighting with nonsense and
Speaker 2: the irrationality. And they did it with every medium of
Speaker 2: art they could. So they made really weird shit, and
Speaker 2: it's like it didn't last as long, right, because it's
Speaker 2: not as like pleasant, right, Like surrealism is like even
Speaker 2: though it's like fucking weird, you're like, oh, it's like
Speaker 2: there's like nice colors and shit, you know, right, it's.
Speaker 3: Like aesthetically pleasing. Yes, once again, I am doing a
Speaker 3: Google image search for data art.
Speaker 2: What do you get? Is it a lot of graphic design.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of design's.
Speaker 2: Do you get the toilet, the journal, We'll talk about
Speaker 2: the journal.
Speaker 3: There's like a lot of like what just seems like
Speaker 3: a collage.
Speaker 1: Like, can't even tell you how much my APR history
Speaker 1: teacher talked about that fucking toilet.
Speaker 2: I actually, I'm gonna be really curious when we get
Speaker 2: to that part to ask what your a p English
Speaker 2: teacher said about it. But yeah, like they, yeah, they
Speaker 2: speaking of trauma. Let's bring up about it.
Speaker 1: And I used to get in trouble for talking in class.
Speaker 2: Just pretend she's a giant spider he of course. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The only way I had passed Art history once I
Speaker 2: learned that my art history teacher really liked the Rococo
Speaker 2: and was complain about how none of her students liked Rococo.
Speaker 2: So it was the only period I studied. And then
Speaker 2: I wrote my paper on it, and then I was like,
Speaker 2: I'm a horrible person. I basically was just like, oh,
Speaker 2: I really struggle with this class, obviously, but I really
Speaker 2: liked Rococo. It totally spoke to me. And she was like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, me too, and she gave me a
Speaker 2: passing grade.
Speaker 3: That's the way you hustled, Yeah, work smarter not yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, so data. No one agrees where the
Speaker 2: name comes from, it's possible. The most common version of
Speaker 2: the story is that someone opened up a dictionary at
Speaker 2: random and stabbed down a knife into the French word
Speaker 2: for hobby horse. Maybe it's maybe they used it because
Speaker 2: it's a child's first word, you know, like and it's
Speaker 2: like sort of nonsense word. Yeah, or a lot of
Speaker 2: Romanians in Switzerland were a big part of the starting
Speaker 2: of it, and so when they kept saying like yes, yes,
Speaker 2: they were saying da da Right, maybe the creators intentionally
Speaker 2: lied about where it comes from. I think that's the
Speaker 2: most likely answer.
Speaker 3: Sounds like a very data thing to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Data was basically founded by this couple, a
Speaker 2: man and a woman. So history, of course, only remembers
Speaker 2: the man, who by all accounts was actually pretty good
Speaker 2: to his partner. So here's to the wife guys of history,
Speaker 2: and they start off their journey here as anarchists, probably
Speaker 2: anarchists pacifists. Their name are names are Hugo Ball and
Speaker 2: Emmy Hennings. Hugo was a German born into the conserv
Speaker 2: into a conservative Catholic family living in Belgium, and he
Speaker 2: saw firsthand what machine guns do to people, Belgium being
Speaker 2: one of the first places that the like mass casualties
Speaker 2: of machine guns of white people because spoiler not spoiler,
Speaker 2: a thing that happened and of course is the first
Speaker 2: use of machine guns. And war was like against indigenous
Speaker 2: people in Africa that I'm aware of. I don't know whatever. Anyway,
Speaker 2: he saw this and he had a quote, the war
Speaker 2: is founded on a glaring mistake. Men have been confused
Speaker 2: with machines. Basically, it's like, wait, what like this is dumb?
Speaker 2: Machines should fight it out? Why are people fighting it out?
Speaker 2: They die? Like they all die. That seems bad, right, right,
Speaker 2: So the war's going on. So he fucks off to
Speaker 2: Switzerland with Emmy, who I think might be the one
Speaker 2: who got him into anarchism and shit, though don't quote
Speaker 2: me on it. She was a cabaret dancer and she
Speaker 2: was a year older than him and had already been
Speaker 2: married and was publishing poems in radical like lefty newspapers.
Speaker 2: And they're in their like late twenties at this point.
Speaker 2: They're like, all right, you gotta eat the fuck out.
Speaker 2: We're going to Switzerland. They go to Zurich and they
Speaker 2: show up and they're starving artists. They're trying to scrape by.
Speaker 2: They're working on all these different shows and shit. As
Speaker 2: performers or writers or whatever, and this is a really
Speaker 2: interesting place to be because like everyone who's fleeing the war,
Speaker 2: like all the all the radicals who are like being
Speaker 2: persecuted by their governments for being pacifists or being against
Speaker 2: the war whatever, are all coming here. Right. So nineteen
Speaker 2: sixteen they start Cabaret Voltaire and soon they have all
Speaker 2: these artists in their orbit, and they start a magazine too,
Speaker 2: and they name it Cabaret Voltaire, which is fine, Like
Speaker 2: it's not like the most original thing to give it
Speaker 2: the same name, but whatever, I would probably do.
Speaker 3: That creativity is hard, I know.
Speaker 2: It is, and they're putting all of it into their
Speaker 2: cabaret because their cabaret is fucking weird. Like when I
Speaker 2: think of a cabaret, I think of like, well, I
Speaker 2: probably mostly think of the movie Cabaret, right, and I
Speaker 2: think about like these like very structured like here's these
Speaker 2: people performing for this specific audience and like, you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know whatever. This cabaret was a venue for poetry, dance,
Speaker 2: and music, and people tried all kinds of avantcar shit.
Speaker 2: There were poems without words known in any language, people
Speaker 2: reading poems at the same time as one another. There's
Speaker 2: like noise scenes stuff like people playing concerts with typewriters
Speaker 2: and rakes all the shit that's like kind of cool
Speaker 2: and kind of annoying, you know an equal.
Speaker 3: Okay, sure, prodo stomp.
Speaker 2: It sounds like, yeah, stomp is the commercialization of of
Speaker 2: of noise, Okay, which is fine. I mean there's actually
Speaker 2: whatever speaking of the commercialization of radical culture. Wow, did
Speaker 2: you know that this show is actually sponsored?
Speaker 3: I did?
Speaker 2: Oh not your first write.
Speaker 3: Sorry, I'll try again. I did not tell me more.
Speaker 2: Well, if you want to know more, you can listen
Speaker 2: to these things that I wholeheartedly and earnestly support. And
Speaker 2: we're back. So there's people wearing all kinds of weird
Speaker 2: ridiculous outfits, doing strange dances and shit like there's a
Speaker 2: picture of like Hugo Ball and like a machine robot
Speaker 2: costume that's like cheesy as shit, looks kind of like
Speaker 2: the Tin Man like. And there's a a riotous crowd.
Speaker 2: It's not people nodding along quietly. It's not like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm going to go perform, everyone better be quiet while
Speaker 2: I read my poem. That is not the vibe here.
Speaker 2: One poet apparently like to punctuate his speaking by shooting
Speaker 2: a gun into the air. WHOA, I'm sure the owners
Speaker 2: of the club fucking love that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sounds a bit dangerous.
Speaker 2: The word data is on a banner by the piano,
Speaker 2: and it's basically they're like, what if we just do
Speaker 2: chaos right? And part of their efforts at anti colonialism
Speaker 2: wouldn't read right in today's eyes, which is that they
Speaker 2: had to have like African drumming and like African inspired
Speaker 2: war masks as part of the decorations, although they were
Speaker 2: also actively supporting African anti colonial movements.
Speaker 3: And I think that, okay, so appropriating some like part
Speaker 3: of it is appropriation, and part of it it's like,
Speaker 3: but we support.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like militant support. And I don't fucking know, Like,
Speaker 2: I don't. I think this is a good example of
Speaker 2: like not necessarily holding people to the same standards because
Speaker 2: things were different, not even like, oh we've learned more now,
Speaker 2: it's just like literally the way that people would have
Speaker 2: interacted with all of those things could have been very
Speaker 2: different or not. I don't know. Also it's possible, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: We'll speak for yourself, but you know, there's also all
Speaker 2: these like It's also possible that the war Masks are
Speaker 2: actually Romanian folklore inspired, depending on the what source you read.
Speaker 2: I'd put money that they do both. A fucking ton
Speaker 2: of the people involved at the start are Romanian Jews
Speaker 2: in exile, and sometimes the shows turn into riots or
Speaker 2: cause other scandals, and the cops were like, not fans
Speaker 2: of Cabaret Voltaire. So it's just a punk club. It's
Speaker 2: just a fucking coolest shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's cool.
Speaker 3: The cops don't like.
Speaker 2: It, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So Hugo Ball writes the first Data Manifesto in nineteen sixteen,
Speaker 2: and he like reads it out at the club because
Speaker 2: of course he does. And one of the lines in it,
Speaker 2: to sort of give you a sense of the sort
Speaker 2: of whatever, quote, how can one get rid of everything
Speaker 2: that smacks of journalism? Worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic,
Speaker 2: You're peanized and never ated by saying dada. Dada is
Speaker 2: the word soul. Data is the pawn shop. Dada is
Speaker 2: the world's best lily milk soap. Basically, it's like, I'm
Speaker 2: going to spew nonsense because I am sick of the
Speaker 2: capitalist world is obsessed with everything being like neat and orderly.
Speaker 2: We are going to just like throw everything into chaos
Speaker 2: until something better comes along. All the while, Hugo, Hugo,
Speaker 2: Ball not Boss. I don't know how you, Hugo Boss.
Speaker 1: Thought it the entire time you were saying Ball. I
Speaker 1: thought Boss the entire time, even though I know it
Speaker 1: was wrong. It was like, Hugo, one's a Nazi, One's
Speaker 1: not a Nazi.
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh huh yeah. All the while, Hugo is obsessed
Speaker 2: with Catholic mysticism, Supposedly, at the same time as he's
Speaker 2: like sticking the knife into the dictionary and coming up
Speaker 2: with the word data, he's like building an altar in
Speaker 2: the corner of his room. Interesting, and their whole thing
Speaker 2: is against rationalism. In the art world, they're against aesthetics.
Speaker 2: Now we can talk about the urinal Marcel Duchamp, who is,
Speaker 2: aw yeah, one of the early Dadaists and later Surrealist.
Speaker 2: He gets into the ready made, which is basically, you
Speaker 2: take a mass produced object, you give it a title,
Speaker 2: and you're like, here you go, here's your fucking art.
Speaker 1: Do you do you know the story behind Fountain?
Speaker 2: Tell me the story behind Fountain.
Speaker 1: Okay. Fountain is the piece that everybody calls the urinal.
Speaker 1: It's an upside down yurinal where he just signed it
Speaker 1: our period mutt with the year and I think it
Speaker 1: was nineteen seventeen. Somebody can found check me if I'm wrong. Sorry.
Speaker 1: And there was this art competition that was like you
Speaker 1: can submit anything, and that's what he and he submitted
Speaker 1: it anonymously and everybody freaked the fuck out and it
Speaker 1: like changed all of art because it was like, what
Speaker 1: is art? Is this art? Can we define this as art?
Speaker 1: And everybody lost their goddamn minds.
Speaker 2: It's cool. Yeah, no, it's really cool to me. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And like apparently they didn't put it into the main show.
Speaker 2: They were like, this is not fucking art, but they
Speaker 2: they did photographics. Well they thought they thought it was
Speaker 2: a joke at first. Yeah. Yeah. Well but here's the
Speaker 2: thing I'm trying to figure out is that like everything
Speaker 2: I had read about it, like art history wise, which
Speaker 2: is again I clearly have laid out that I did
Speaker 2: not pay much attention to art history.
Speaker 1: I've clearly laid out that I that I did. I
Speaker 1: knew that I knew that story off the cuffin right,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't talking too much in class.
Speaker 2: So there's like one way of interpreting it where it's
Speaker 2: like whoa man, Like everything is art, that's so deep.
Speaker 2: And then there's another way that seems more realistic to me,
Speaker 2: which is that he was being like it's trolling. It's like,
Speaker 2: fuck you, fuck your art world. Here's a fucking urinal.
Speaker 2: I'm calling it fountain. Fucking deal with it, you know.
Speaker 2: And it might be both right, Like it might be like, look,
Speaker 2: everything's art, nothing's art, dunam you know.
Speaker 3: It could be could be something that I did in
Speaker 3: school sometimes where I was like, oops, this project's due
Speaker 3: and I didn't do anything for it, so I'll just
Speaker 3: slap the thing on another thing that's already a thing
Speaker 3: and then pretend like I'm a genius.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but maybe you were genius, Caitlyn, and maybe I was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe I was.
Speaker 2: The real genius was the thing that came up from
Speaker 2: your own conscience as you were trying to evade the rules.
Speaker 2: So sadly, this concept and lots of anti art and
Speaker 2: surrealism were later recuperated into capitalism, like by that asshole
Speaker 2: Andy Warhol, who basically did the same thing but for
Speaker 2: capitalism instead of against capitalism. But data along the way.
Speaker 2: They're also against nationalism and colonialism. They figure that these
Speaker 2: two things are the cause of war, and above everything
Speaker 2: else there against war, right, And soon it spreads this
Speaker 2: like fucking wild punk scene. The original club gets shut down,
Speaker 2: I think by the cops after like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: six months. It does not last, it does not last
Speaker 2: a very long time, but data goes across the Western world,
Speaker 2: and Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, the two people who
Speaker 2: opened Cabaret Voltaire, they're out. Depending on the source, they
Speaker 2: stuck around with the movement for a few more months
Speaker 2: to a few more years, but basically I think they
Speaker 2: were like, oh my god, fucking art movement, we've become
Speaker 2: the thing we've hated, and we're out. But by nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty they've reconverted to like traditional Catholicism, and Hugo spends
Speaker 2: the rest of his short life obsessed with theology and
Speaker 2: Christian mysticism and now the obsessive rationalism that he's fighting against.
Speaker 2: He's still against rationalism, but he's against the He now
Speaker 2: blames it on the Protestant Reformation. Right, he fucking loses it.
Speaker 3: I was just like, what, I don't understand it.
Speaker 2: I mean, I understand it, but it's not good, you know, right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did not see that coming. No, but good
Speaker 3: for him, Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 2: He died of cancer, super young, at forty one years old.
Speaker 2: Emmy lasted decades longer. But Data goes on without them. Right.
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighteen, a Jewish Romanian who had been there
Speaker 2: since more or less the beginning. His name is Tristan Zara.
Speaker 2: He writes a new Data manifesto, and he goes on
Speaker 2: to lead the movement. He helps it spread, and he's the
Speaker 2: one who brought it to all the folks who are
Speaker 2: going to go on to start the surrealist movement. Now,
Speaker 2: Dada had an ideological fight with another art movement. I'm guessing,
Speaker 2: based on your knowledge of surrealism and Data, you're not
Speaker 2: super familiar with futurism.
Speaker 3: I'm really not you be correct, Sophie.
Speaker 2: What you got on futurism?
Speaker 1: I don't have much on futurism, to be honest with you.
Speaker 1: Is there another name for it?
Speaker 2: No, this is a futurist movement. The reason it falls
Speaker 2: out of favor of history is that they were really
Speaker 2: into the Nazis after a while.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's probably why I don't know about it as much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's what is what does the style look like?
Speaker 2: It's like Metropolis, the movie Metropolis. Like it's like it's
Speaker 2: like we're gonna go into this bright, beautiful future where
Speaker 2: the machines are like work for us, and like it's
Speaker 2: like lots of like city scapes and shit.
Speaker 3: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 1: Right, and bright colors looks almost like a collage. But
Speaker 1: then am I remember is that what that is? I
Speaker 1: just think I just don't know the name.
Speaker 2: Oh see, I just think of Metropolis so much that
Speaker 2: I'm actually now got to look up futurism art. See,
Speaker 2: I know more about the politics of everything. Like at
Speaker 2: one point, yeah, I know, you're right, bright colors and shit.
Speaker 2: I was walking around this bookstore with my mom and
Speaker 2: I was like telling her all the politics of all
Speaker 2: the authors, and my mom was like, you know these
Speaker 2: books are about and I'm like, no.
Speaker 1: No way, I did I remember. I remember.
Speaker 3: Some of this stuff.
Speaker 1: I just didn't know it was called futurism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so.
Speaker 1: Maybe I was busy talking in class.
Speaker 3: That was one of the days that you were just
Speaker 3: yapping those gums, flapping those gums.
Speaker 2: See. When I was in art school, I had this roommate,
Speaker 2: and he was a He wrote a neo futurist manifesto
Speaker 2: and it was like super hierarchical, and then I got
Speaker 2: really into anarchy and we got into these like fistfights
Speaker 2: about it, and then in the end he became an
Speaker 2: anarco futurist, where it was like all of the same
Speaker 2: concept but instead it was like a galitarian m hmm,
Speaker 2: well a similar thing happened before that, where so the
Speaker 2: futures didn't start off Nazis, right, there's actually like interesting
Speaker 2: ideological shit going on with the futurists, but they eventually
Speaker 2: most of them are like a bunch of Nazis, and
Speaker 2: so the Dadasts are like fuck you, like you suck,
Speaker 2: and overall that kind of win this fight, like Dada
Speaker 2: is remembered and futurism is more of a footnote, you know.
Speaker 2: There however, were a bunch of people involved in Data
Speaker 2: who ended up not so good, including one Italian guy
Speaker 2: who sided with the Dadists I think in the fight
Speaker 2: against the futurists, because the futurism mostly comes from Italy,
Speaker 2: like fascism, okay.
Speaker 3: And.
Speaker 2: There's someone who was personal friends with Zara who turned
Speaker 2: out to be really no good, and his name is Julievola.
Speaker 2: Julius Evola is like he's like the mysticism guy that
Speaker 2: all the Nazis are into. He's the like if you
Speaker 2: meet like people who are like into weird esoteric shit
Speaker 2: where they think they're really deep and they're fucking fascists.
Speaker 2: Avola is there, like guy, okay, gross, like fuck the
Speaker 2: modern world, but not in a cool way where like
Speaker 2: we're equal and live with nature, but instead in some
Speaker 2: fucking weird way of being Nazis. That's my Julius Vola quote.
Speaker 2: It's direct quote.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, verbatim.
Speaker 2: I did the translation myself. I'm not great at Italian,
Speaker 2: but I feel pretty confident.
Speaker 3: Yeah no, that sounds right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So Avola took the anti rationalism of data and
Speaker 2: instead of being like therefore freedom, he was like therefore fascism.
Speaker 2: And we're not gonna deep dive him because he's not
Speaker 2: a cool person did cool stuff. He's a bad but
Speaker 2: weird person who did bad but oddly banal stuff.
Speaker 3: Okay, that should well spinoff podcast where is it.
Speaker 2: Bad people did odd but banal stuff?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I bet I Yeah, I'm not doing a trilogy.
Speaker 2: Anyway. Fuck that guy. Zara the cool one. By nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 2: he leaves Switzerland to go hang because the war's over
Speaker 2: and shit right, he goes go hang out with the
Speaker 2: cool Paris dotsts who are like having the most fun
Speaker 2: maybe and they and they start publishing a magazine with
Speaker 2: fucking dog shit name. Literature is the name of their
Speaker 2: magazine because they'll pretentious this fight. I hate it. Don't
Speaker 2: name your magazine literature.
Speaker 3: Sorry, that sounds so bass, you know, Oh yeah no,
Speaker 3: totally yeah, yeah we stan we stan literature, yeah, but
Speaker 3: dead ass Yeah.
Speaker 2: By doing it there we.
Speaker 1: Go probably say it with some there is.
Speaker 2: Wait, I don't know, I've never heard that one.
Speaker 1: That's fine, it's it's what it's what jen, it's what
Speaker 1: the youth use to shorten charisma. They call it the
Speaker 1: person has riz.
Speaker 3: All right, all right, I mean that is creative.
Speaker 1: That has been words My much uger, much cooler employees
Speaker 1: have taught me.
Speaker 2: Is compared to me, You're like older employer is like
Speaker 2: I can tell you all about the drama in nineteen twenty,
Speaker 2: and I don't know shit about what's happening in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Listen, listen, find people who can do it all all
Speaker 1: I'm saying I need I need it all in my
Speaker 1: life because.
Speaker 2: You're a girl boss. That's that's slang. But that's a
Speaker 2: bad one. Now you're not that, because you're you're good.
Speaker 2: Only there were a word for good, there isn't. We
Speaker 2: just use the word good. So so the pure negation
Speaker 2: of art that the Dadas were seeking soon turned into
Speaker 2: a pure negation of each other over minor differences, which
Speaker 2: will surprise no one who's hung out in a cool
Speaker 2: as fuck punk scene. Unfortunately, soon they're publishing like hit
Speaker 2: pieces on each other being like but not like they're
Speaker 2: not like publishing hippies is on, like a vola, right,
Speaker 2: they're publishing hippiees is Onlike the way that you're interpreting
Speaker 2: your particular interpretation of leftism is not the same as
Speaker 2: mine or whatever.
Speaker 3: Okay, So it's like Distracks basically of the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally and probably worse, although I don't know, I
Speaker 2: mean some of it's kind of interesting and okay. So
Speaker 2: basically you got Zara, who started off like kind of
Speaker 2: leader of the Dadas, and then you've got Andre Berton,
Speaker 2: who's going to end up the leader of the surrealists,
Speaker 2: and he calls Zara an impostor and basically a clout chaser. Also,
Speaker 2: only historians call them leaders to be clear, like the
Speaker 2: leader of it. Actually Breton might have called himself the leader,
Speaker 2: but no, whatever, we'll get to it. He wasn't actually
Speaker 2: the leader. Breton basically calls Zara an impostor and a
Speaker 2: cloud chaser, which is probably true. The cloud chaser part.
Speaker 2: There's no way you can call Zara an impostor with
Speaker 2: data is it's like fifty to fifty. The name literally
Speaker 2: comes from him going yes, yes, in a club right
Speaker 2: this or that. Datas group started having trouble with each other,
Speaker 2: they're like, no, you're out of the club. And they're like, no,
Speaker 2: you're out of the club. Look, I'm crossing you off
Speaker 2: the official roster. See that was your name, and now
Speaker 2: there's a line through it, you know. And so, ladies, gentlemen,
Speaker 2: and between of these, if your art movement has an
Speaker 2: official roster, you asked for it.
Speaker 3: That is not very art. I would say, yeah, totally
Speaker 3: have a list.
Speaker 1: And you also asked for these ads unless you have
Speaker 1: cooler zone media. If you asked for just this ad transition.
Speaker 2: And we're back so this occasionally gets physical. One of
Speaker 2: Zara's plays gets disrupted by Breton and some furniture gets
Speaker 2: smashed and the cops end up showing up. They also
Speaker 2: like to fight about anarchism versus communism, although they all
Speaker 2: keep changing their minds about like which where they're at
Speaker 2: on any of these given spectrums, nothing ever changes. So
Speaker 2: then in nineteen twenty two, Data threw its own funeral,
Speaker 2: which I think is clisse. Hell. We're like they people,
Speaker 2: We're done, explain like we did it. I's have a
Speaker 2: funeral for Data. Data is done, okay, which actually to
Speaker 2: make it even more punk. In nineteen eighty two or no,
Speaker 2: maybe in the seventies, Fuck, someone's gonna check my punk.
Speaker 2: Cred Crass, an anarchist punk band from the UK, release
Speaker 2: an album called Punk is Dead, and basically it was
Speaker 2: like Punk's over and it was like before punk really
Speaker 2: even like got going. But Data throws its own funeral
Speaker 2: and the whole because the whole point it wasn't to
Speaker 2: become a shitty art movement, but they had become a
Speaker 2: shitty art movement. They're like, we're good, it's done, Dada
Speaker 2: did its thing. We all go home now. And in
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty four, when the Surrealist Manifesto comes out. It's
Speaker 2: basically like surrealism has devoured data, which is not wrong. Okay,
Speaker 2: But before we move to surrealism, I want to follow
Speaker 2: up with Zara because he's cool and he doesn't take
Speaker 2: center stage in surrealism quite the way he doesn't Dada,
Speaker 2: mostly because Breton kind of won that fight and he's like,
Speaker 2: fuck you, you're not a real surrealist or whatever the
Speaker 2: fucking bullshit. He was stubbornly independent. He didn't like when
Speaker 2: in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties the surrealists were
Speaker 2: like getting in with the Communist Party, and he kept
Speaker 2: getting into fights with Breton. But soon they're all having
Speaker 2: bigger problems, Nazi shape problems. By nineteen thirty three, he's like,
Speaker 2: fuck it, communism, it's better than fascism. So he retires
Speaker 2: from art promotion and he moves into anti fascist organizing.
Speaker 2: He goes briefly over to Spain to join the en
Speaker 2: anti fascist forces in their war against Franco, which we've
Speaker 2: talked about million times in the show, and I'll talk
Speaker 2: about a little bit later in the script. And then
Speaker 2: he comes back and he organizes benefits and he puts
Speaker 2: out poetry anthologies of the world's most celebrated poets against
Speaker 2: all this fascist shit. And he's just basically like, I'm
Speaker 2: going to figure out how to leverage my art cred
Speaker 2: to bring attention to the need to destroy fascism. And
Speaker 2: this is before World War two, right, this is when
Speaker 2: like this is one of the like before anti fashion,
Speaker 2: anti fascism went mainstream. You know, when World War II
Speaker 2: broke out, he went to southern France. The fact they
Speaker 2: didn't fuck off entirely as a communist Jew and a
Speaker 2: degenerate artist is probably testament to his courage slash partly
Speaker 2: he probably had a hard time getting out. He joined
Speaker 2: the resistance. He fought alongside the Maqui, which of the
Speaker 2: Spanish rebels we talked about one of our episodes in
Speaker 2: the Resistance to Franco. He ran the cultural broadcast for
Speaker 2: the Free French Forces pirate radio station while his son
Speaker 2: was fighting in the north of France against the fucking Nazis.
Speaker 2: And at this point, as a Jew, he stripped of
Speaker 2: his Romanian citizenship and his home country won't sell his books, right,
Speaker 2: so he is like a man without a country. Fighting
Speaker 2: desperately alongside his son against the fascists. And at this
Speaker 2: point he's like, all right, I guess fucking I'm a communist.
Speaker 2: Right and the war ends, He's like, I guess I'm
Speaker 2: a communist. Have you ever heard of speaking of slang?
Speaker 2: Have you ever heard of people talk about tankies?
Speaker 3: I don't think so.
Speaker 2: Wow, we live on such different corners of the Internet.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of jealous.
Speaker 3: The corner of the Internet I live on is looking
Speaker 3: at cat videos.
Speaker 2: This is a better part if if, yeah, Sophie, you
Speaker 2: ever heard of tankies?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Tanky's is a pejorative for authoritarian communists, particularly Stalinists.
Speaker 2: If there's like someone online who's being like like, Iran
Speaker 2: is good because they hate the US or fucking the
Speaker 2: shitty dictator of Syria what's his fucking name?
Speaker 1: Asad?
Speaker 2: Asad is good because he hates the US, or Russia
Speaker 2: is good because they hate the US, right, Like, this
Speaker 2: is a tanky position. This is a position that comes
Speaker 2: from like weird old Cold war bullshit where they're like,
Speaker 2: I'm just so completely whatever, I fucking hate them because
Speaker 2: it's a nonsensical thing. Well, and it's for anyone who's
Speaker 2: attracted to the image of like state power with lots
Speaker 2: of lines of tanks and huge, big red flags and Shitay,
Speaker 2: this piece of slang actually comes from the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2: It only got popular in the US thanks to Twitter,
Speaker 2: which famously was not invented until sometime after the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2: I've heard that, yeah. In nineteen fifty six, there was
Speaker 2: a huge uprising in Hungary against the Soviet Union, and
Speaker 2: it came from all different types of Hungarians, and it
Speaker 2: included a ton of leftists, including a ton of communists. Basically,
Speaker 2: the USSR is bad, which is a reasonable position because
Speaker 2: they are right. And this basically split the communists left
Speaker 2: around the world, the people who don't live in the
Speaker 2: Soviet Union. Also, half of them, the tankies approved, they
Speaker 2: didn't call themselves as their opponents did, approved of the
Speaker 2: USSR sending in tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution. The
Speaker 2: other half, who might be called quote, people with the
Speaker 2: reasonable understanding of the human desire for freedom and also
Speaker 2: basic understanding of what communism is actually supposed to be about.
Speaker 2: They supported the Hungarian Revolution. Zara supported the Hungarian Revolution,
Speaker 2: which is a break from the Communist Party right. He
Speaker 2: didn't entirely support it, but he supported it enough to
Speaker 2: piss off the tankies any possible, like, hey, maybe it's
Speaker 2: bad when they get murdered, is like an enough to
Speaker 2: be like, how dare you question our supreme leader? You know? Yeah,
Speaker 2: And the Hungarian Revolution was mercilessly crushed by the authoritarian
Speaker 2: forces of the USSR, and I think this kind of
Speaker 2: breaks his heart, and he's just like, fuck it whatever,
Speaker 2: I'm staying out of public life. Everything sucks, and he
Speaker 2: just he keeps doing activism, he keeps fighting, fighting for decolonization,
Speaker 2: which is like the main issue for a lot of
Speaker 2: these people.
Speaker 1: M h.
Speaker 2: And then he makes it to his sixties and then
Speaker 2: he does what everyone does eventually, which is die.
Speaker 3: A lot of these for yourself again.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, I mean, well, I'm not speaking for myself.
Speaker 2: I was around during all this stuff. I'm gonna be
Speaker 2: around till the heat death.
Speaker 3: Of the universe.
Speaker 2: When I keep saying the show's gonna be around to
Speaker 2: the heat death of the universe, I mean with me
Speaker 2: as the host.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, obviously.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's because I grew up in the blood drinking
Speaker 2: cult Catholicism, where everyone's a vampire.
Speaker 1: Mmmm.
Speaker 3: That's why I have so many spare legs. I'm just
Speaker 3: sicking the blood out of them.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, you slowly went from the spider to centipede
Speaker 2: to millipede.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Okay, So now we're gonna leave data and go to surrealism.
Speaker 2: What the fuck is surrealism. It's got all these notable
Speaker 2: characteristics we've talked about. It's all about the unfettered and
Speaker 2: unfiltered imagination. It's about freedom of people's bodies and minds.
Speaker 2: It's about dreams. It's about automatic writing, it's about channeled
Speaker 2: forms of expression. It's about the juxtaposition of the ordinary
Speaker 2: until it is no longer ordinary. Basically, if data is
Speaker 2: like a fundamentally nihilist rejection of the existent, surrealism is
Speaker 2: a way to dream possible alternatives, a way to dream
Speaker 2: up and manifest the impossible. So like going back to
Speaker 2: utopianism in a way, but instead of it being kind
Speaker 2: of like we're gonna build the workers Paradise, it's a
Speaker 2: little bit more like, yes, but we're gonna do that
Speaker 2: by like living our impossible dreams, like nothing is impossible,
Speaker 2: because reality itself is something that we can shape. I
Speaker 2: I knew, I like surrealism. And then the more I
Speaker 2: research this shit, the more I'm like, these people fucking rule.
Speaker 2: Some of them who some of the folks that started
Speaker 2: out with were some of the data folks who were
Speaker 2: med students in Paris, and they were super into art
Speaker 2: and all this shit. But they're also into all this
Speaker 2: new psychoanalysis stuff that's going around. They've been doing automatic
Speaker 2: writing and we're starting to wonder if there's more to
Speaker 2: reality than what gets presented as reality. And they're into
Speaker 2: the idea that somewhere between the conscious and unconscious is
Speaker 2: a third thing, like the meme, Like, you know, do
Speaker 2: you want this without or do you want the secret
Speaker 2: third thing?
Speaker 3: Mm.
Speaker 2: The thing that they're trying to create is a surrealist revolution,
Speaker 2: a new way to find a higher reality, that space
Speaker 2: between the conscious and the unconscious. And they realize that
Speaker 2: exploitation and inequality is what's standing in the way of that.
Speaker 2: So it's not just a spiritual revolution, but a physical
Speaker 2: material one. It's like it's like one of the things
Speaker 2: that the most of the hippies got right, but like
Speaker 2: our memory of the Hippies is a society thinks they
Speaker 2: only cared about like getting high and like opening the
Speaker 2: doors of perception or whatever, you know, right right, actually
Speaker 2: a good chunk of them. We're like, actually, we can't
Speaker 2: do that until we like the everyone's free. But you know,
Speaker 2: they called what they were fighting for the marvelous with
Speaker 2: a capital M. And this is contrasted with its opponent,
Speaker 2: basically miserable miserableism, which also is a capital M. Okay,
Speaker 2: I want to quote a living surrealist author, Ron Skakowski.
Speaker 2: Miserableism is a system that produces misery and then rationalizes
Speaker 2: it by perpetuating the idea that such misery comprises the
Speaker 2: only possible reality. It's basically like, oh, everything sucks, but
Speaker 2: it's just that's the.
Speaker 3: Way it is, how it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And so this to the surrealis absolutely includes
Speaker 2: the art world. The art world is part of miserableism
Speaker 2: when it all starts to kick off in nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 2: Like when they have the Surrealist Manifesto. They've been doing
Speaker 2: the ship for a while, right, but when they kind
Speaker 2: of put the name to it, it's still slightly apolitical.
Speaker 2: They had anarchist assassin heroes and shit, but they hadn't
Speaker 2: quite been Like, surrealism is revolution in a literal sense,
Speaker 2: this only lasted a couple months. The inciting incident was
Speaker 2: the Riff War, which was this anti colonial uprising by
Speaker 2: the Berbers in northern Morocco. And the reason it's interesting
Speaker 2: to me is that like we tend to think of
Speaker 2: white Europeans as only caring about white europe you know,
Speaker 2: m h. But like radicals at the time were absolutely
Speaker 2: paying attention to and sometimes participants in anti colonial struggle,
Speaker 2: not as much as the Eventually, I'm hoping I'll do
Speaker 2: a whole thing on the Riftwar and a bunch of
Speaker 2: these anti colonial revolutions, But like, basically, the Berbers in
Speaker 2: northern Morocco are like, all right, we're getting rid of
Speaker 2: this fucking government, the colonial government. We're gonna get rid
Speaker 2: of the Spanish right, and they've been fighting against the
Speaker 2: Spanish for several years. But by nine teen twenty five
Speaker 2: they attacked French colonial holdings too, because France also was
Speaker 2: stealing a bunch of their shit. In two weeks, they
Speaker 2: drove the French out of forty of their sixty six
Speaker 2: military bases and killed, injured or captured twenty percent of
Speaker 2: the French forces in the region, which is they are
Speaker 2: like outnumbered and outgunned substantially, and they're just like fucking
Speaker 2: kicking ass.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But the problem here is that France and Spain were
Speaker 2: quite excited to get willing, quite willing to put aside
Speaker 2: their differences and work together to smash this rebellion. And
Speaker 2: they had the numbers and the guns, and they put
Speaker 2: down the uprising by nineteen twenty six. But along the way,
Speaker 2: the Surrealists are like, we fucking like these people, the
Speaker 2: marvelous demands. We fight miserableism with guns if need be,
Speaker 2: or to quote them more directly, quote we Surrealists pronounced
Speaker 2: ourselves in favor of changing the imperialist war in its
Speaker 2: chronic and colonial form into a civil war. Thus we
Speaker 2: placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution of
Speaker 2: the proletariat and its struggles, and to find our attitude
Speaker 2: towards the colonial problem and hence towards the color question,
Speaker 2: which I really like the like, oh, yeah, this imperialist
Speaker 2: war whatever becomes a fucking civil war, huh fuck you
Speaker 2: you know, which they didn't pull off, right, but like
Speaker 2: most people don't.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it means that the Surrealists started off as an
Speaker 2: explicitly anti racist organization. Their first specific thing was the
Speaker 2: color question, right mm hm, And they started off okay. So,
Speaker 2: like the other thing that happened whiles researching this is
Speaker 2: that I like start off with all these like there's
Speaker 2: like the art world assumptions of everything that I had
Speaker 2: heard about surrealists, which is like Dali the only surrealist
Speaker 2: you know, and then there's the like kind of like
Speaker 2: vague Okay, they were people, and they had this politics
Speaker 2: and stuff, and it turns out most of what I
Speaker 2: learned from that was all so wrong, right, okay, Because
Speaker 2: like one of the things that you read about is
Speaker 2: that it started off like a total boys club, but
Speaker 2: it it didn't start off as a boys club. It
Speaker 2: started with women and men both. The very first issue
Speaker 2: of the magazine, Surrealist Revolution had women and had women
Speaker 2: and men both in it. Women were left out of
Speaker 2: the press about the organization by two groups I know,
Speaker 2: and it's by the exactly the two groups you'd expect.
Speaker 2: One the guys in the club who kind of wanted
Speaker 2: to put up a no girl's allowed sign, right, and
Speaker 2: they were like, oh no, it's us, And they're like
Speaker 2: shouldering each other out of the way to be like ah,
Speaker 2: it's all us, you know, and also by the press
Speaker 2: who just fucking ate it up and just want to
Speaker 2: talk about boys in their paintings, you know, storing. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I like genuinely, I was like, oh, I'm gonna have
Speaker 2: to like fast forward through all the fucking boys club shit,
Speaker 2: and then I'm like, oh, there was like people who
Speaker 2: tried to make it a boy's club and they didn't succeed.
Speaker 3: Okay, good.
Speaker 2: The only people writing about women's surrealists were the surrealists,
Speaker 2: both women and men. The art critics were ignoring them,
Speaker 2: essentially until the women's liberation movement in the sixties and seventies,
Speaker 2: when suddenly you start having people go back in history
Speaker 2: and be like, oh, actually, there was literally hundreds of
Speaker 2: women involved in all of their fucking art exhibits, like,
Speaker 2: you know, like every every step of the way. M hm,
Speaker 2: one kind of wow.
Speaker 3: Women exist and did things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they weren't just muses. And one of the problems
Speaker 2: that surrealist had is that they put women on pedestals
Speaker 2: and would be like, the women is the most beautiful,
Speaker 2: perfect thing, and blah blah blah, we need muses or whatever,
Speaker 2: and then these like women would be like, I'm not
Speaker 2: your fucking muse, I'm an artist who And then like
Speaker 2: most of them, men were like, oh that's cool, oh interesting,
Speaker 2: Yeah you don't say I know. Some of them are
Speaker 2: probably like, no, never mind, you're not fun anymore. I
Speaker 2: can't wait you speak have thoughts, yeah, leave me alone.
Speaker 2: Or they'd be like, yes, I want your unfiltered, chaotic
Speaker 2: womanly thoughts. Just I get to be.
Speaker 3: The one to write them down, rolling my eyes.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One commenter who was quoted in the book Surrealist
Speaker 2: Women pointed out quote, no comparable movement outside of specifically
Speaker 2: feminist organizations has had such a high proportion of active
Speaker 2: women participants, and the ignoring of these women surrealists actually
Speaker 2: ties into the misreading of Surrealism that mainstream society has
Speaker 2: that is just the painters. This, of course, was actively
Speaker 2: perpetuated in the US by veteran enemy of the pod
Speaker 2: solid Or Dali, who once said, I know this is
Speaker 2: he obviously had his even worse quotes, but this one's
Speaker 2: not great. He wants a talent to store it in
Speaker 2: the balls. This guy saw it really sucks so bad,
Speaker 2: and so he was like, he wrote that about like
Speaker 2: a specific I forgot to write there's like a specific
Speaker 2: woman where he was like, I guess she's all right
Speaker 2: for a girl, but no girl can be truly fantastic,
Speaker 2: because you know, talent is stored in the balls or whatever.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, which is why you have that talisman
Speaker 2: of balls They castrated off of men the only way to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like, okay, all your talent is and your balls,
Speaker 3: well then what if I kick them?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, you know, And so most of the women
Speaker 2: are sorry. More of the women were more likely to
Speaker 2: be writers, especially poets, but also theorists. But there's also
Speaker 2: a ton of painters and photographers too. Literally hundreds of
Speaker 2: women were part of the surrealist movement in his heyday.
Speaker 2: And the surrealist historian I've gotten the most out of
Speaker 2: during my research in these episodes is Penelope Rosemont, and
Speaker 2: she stresses that Surrealism has been mis presented by the
Speaker 2: press and turned into a drama of like splits and
Speaker 2: purges that represent Andre Breton as an authoritarian leader. Penelope
Speaker 2: says about this, from its first day, Surrealism as an
Speaker 2: organized movement was itself a free association. She says that
Speaker 2: even the surrealists who like left angry still described it
Speaker 2: as a free community which practiced collective decision making and
Speaker 2: encouraged the active participation of all. It saw itself not
Speaker 2: as a style of art, but a community of ethical views.
Speaker 2: So it's like, Okay, if you're trying to create the marvelous,
Speaker 2: you're one of us.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: That said. Some of the participants of early surrealism were
Speaker 2: absolutely all about the drama and splits and all about
Speaker 2: gaykeeping and all about like sitting there and crossing off
Speaker 2: names and be like, no, you're not see you got
Speaker 2: crussed off. And we'll talk about that, but only a
Speaker 2: little bit because it's less interesting to me than their
Speaker 2: lives and what they fought for, which we'll get into
Speaker 2: you on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: Wow, I can't wait.
Speaker 2: Well you, I was gonna say you have to, but
Speaker 2: you actually don't have to. Everyone else has to.
Speaker 3: But we're going right into this, I.
Speaker 2: Know, only after we first hear about you, Haylen.
Speaker 3: It's me. I am someone who also hosts a podcast
Speaker 3: which you can listen to if you want. It's called
Speaker 3: the Bechdel Cast, and we talk about movies and examine
Speaker 3: them through an intersectional feminist lens. And by we I
Speaker 3: mean myself and I co host Jamie Loftis, and usually
Speaker 3: I just you know, it's oh gosh, it's a hoot.
Speaker 3: I talk more so, I feel like I've been very
Speaker 3: quiet today. I my COVID brain fog is at an
Speaker 3: all time high.
Speaker 2: Congrats right now, sorry.
Speaker 3: And thank you so much. But you know, on this
Speaker 3: next episode, I just need a drink of water, I think,
Speaker 3: and then I'm going to be so I'm going to
Speaker 3: be saying so many brilliant things. And yeah, also follow
Speaker 3: me on Instagram. I don't know, it doesn't matter, Okay,
Speaker 3: the end.
Speaker 2: I have a project that's probably kickstarting when this is released,
Speaker 2: but I can't remember all the details about schedules of
Speaker 2: either part of it, both the kickstarter or this show
Speaker 2: nice and so it's either going to happen soon or
Speaker 2: happening now or already happened. But either way, you can
Speaker 2: still get this thing I'm writing. I'm doing like world
Speaker 2: building writing for a board game called Defenders of the
Speaker 2: Wild from Outlandish Games, and it has a companion role
Speaker 2: playing game book. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. It's
Speaker 2: like a by the makers of Block by Block, which
Speaker 2: is like a game of a board game of Revolt
Speaker 2: but this one is like you can be like a
Speaker 2: fox with the bow and arrow fighting against machines that
Speaker 2: are trying to enclose all the land and like kill
Speaker 2: all the animals and like whoa, it's really fun and
Speaker 2: I'm helping develop the role playing game world alongside a
Speaker 2: really incredible team of people, and it's like super profession
Speaker 2: like super cool and good. And you can check it
Speaker 2: out by searching Defenders of the Wild Outlandish Games, and
Speaker 2: you can sign up for information about it, or it's
Speaker 2: already happening and you can back it, or it already happened,
Speaker 2: and you can probably still buy it or convince someone
Speaker 2: else to buy it so you can come over to
Speaker 2: their house and play it. Because how can you call
Speaker 2: yourself polyamorous if you don't have a board game night.
Speaker 2: This is not true. I actually don't have a board
Speaker 2: game night. Well I guess I do have a role
Speaker 2: playing game.
Speaker 3: I actually kind of do.
Speaker 2: Oh nice.
Speaker 3: I have some friends. We almost exclusively play Catan. Okay,
Speaker 3: but for now, for now, yes, until I get my
Speaker 3: grubby little fingers on your game.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, Sophie, what do you got ah?
Speaker 1: Cooler Zone Media, Cool Zone Media at cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: cool Zonmedia dot com.
Speaker 2: What about Coolest Zone Media. I'm stealing a joke from
Speaker 2: James Stout.
Speaker 1: We haven't invented that yet, but it's coming.
Speaker 3: So many new things. We've got Coolest Zone Media on
Speaker 3: the horizon. We've got bad people who did what was
Speaker 3: it called again something banal?
Speaker 2: Yeah, bad people who did bad things. The Julius Vola
Speaker 2: podcast mm hmmmm, Great Edge Lords of History. Huh. I
Speaker 2: actually don't want to host that or listen to.
Speaker 3: It, but I don't want to hear anything about it.
Speaker 1: I decline the It's not dream Lit, Not not Not
Speaker 1: on Red Light Boom podcast over Wednesday. Cool People Who
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website
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