International in 1938, after the war he got to know James quite well personally and visited him regulariy until his death. Tony Cliff and Chanie Rosenberg lived with Charlie when they first came to England, in a tiny flat that Charlie was It surc was big enough for them all, but they felt was luxury. Again while they parted political company when Cliff developed the theory of State Capitalism, Charlie always respected Cliff's incisiveness and integrity.
Charlic was a member of the Labour Party from September 1936 until March 2001. In many bitter debates Livio Maitan With the disappearance of our friend and comrade Charlie Gelderen a page of history is symbolically turned. None one comrades who participated in the founding Congress of the Fourth Interational is with us any more. No one could deny that through. out his long life Charlie respected the commitment that he made in September 1938: he has made a valuable contributon to the construction of our movement, not only in South Africa but in Britain and elsewhere - and always with a lucid enthusiasm. In this respect the category of professional revolutionary -which so many bureaucrats have Jiscredited - Is not absolutely Half century For my part I still remember the meeting in London a number of years ago to mark Charlie's half century of militant involvement in our movement. Compared with him I felt young, having at that time a mere 37 years of membership. Italian comrades i can promise that we will not forget the examgave in helping the formation of our movement in Italy during the Second world war. Here is proof that one can still do something for the revolutionary movement while being obliged to be a soldier of an Imperialist army Yes, a page of history has been turned. But the history of the Fourth International and of the revolutionary movement will continue!
Outlook Surrealism: Desire Unbound exhibition at Tate Modern, Bankside, until 1 January 2002. Entrance £8.50, £6.50 concessions. Reviewed by Andrew Kennedy.
T he Surrealism show at Tate Modern should be of interest tc socialists and especially to marxists. After all, the leader of the surrealist group, Amare bicion was co-author with Trotsky of the statement "Towards a Free Revolutionary Art" that appeared in 1938 at the height of Nazi and Stalinist reaction.
The Surrealist group from their inception in Paris in the carly twenties had oriented themselves towards the revolutionary icil and in particular the Communist Party. Yet some marxist beliefs, became unhappy with the increasingly puritanical and repressive artitude of the Communist Party towards their art from the late twenties onward. communism as these artists conceived it is summed up by Salvador Dali, writing in 1931 in his pre-Francoist incarnation:
"there is a dialectical potentiality in the fancy whereby the title of Max Ernst's picture, Revolution by Night, is converted into Revolution by Day, it being understood and exclusive day of dialectical materialism".
What was this revolution by night? Essentially, it meant the liberation of sexual desire through the unleashing of the forces which Freud had identified in the unconscious.
The eruption of the "night" into daily consciousness would subvert the psychological mechanisms which regulate everyday life under capitalism.
F or Freud, the majority of these socially unacceptable, to be labelled as neuroses neutralised through psychoanalysis. For the Surrealists, they were to be celchrated and made flesh, whether through attempts to depict the world of dreams illusionistically, as in the case of Dali, or through "automatic" drawing or paint ing, as in the work of Miro or Masson (where conscious conorder to allow images from the unconscious to manifest themselves), or literally, through choosing to live sexually open lifestyles.
One positive feature of the exhibition is its cultivation of "impurity". Traditionally in Western aesthetics our cocounter with tae artwork Is supposed to be pure and disinexperience, sacred rather than tury this approach has resulted antiseptic isolation, decontextualised on white walls.
By contrast, the experience offered by this exhibition is viewer is made aware that their viewing is incitaoly compro mised by desire. The first room, dimly lit, is painted deep pink.
On one side Max Ernst's representation of ing of this (1923), hangs brightly lit in the recording of a human heartbeat plays. This sets tae tone sor tae prescataton tarouga• *The organisers have tried to Rive some sense of how these works might originally have been viewed in Surrealist installations (which often incorporated womb-like or vagina-like spaces).
Yet this sense is often limited: in one part of another room, a woman's orgasmic sighs play case, whereas, in the original setting for waica tais tape was usca, so the catalogue tells us, the sighs filled the room. wonders what mechanisms of censorship and self-censorship are operating in such circumstances.
T o take another example: the obvious idea (to this reviewer) of having a room dedicated to the theme of religion and desire has not been taken up. It is not hard to guess why.
On the otber hand, the exhibition seriously aduresses bol tae acpicton or women in Surrealism and the contribution of women critiques of the seventies and cighties which pointed out that male Surrealists adopted the time-bonoured strategy of placing 'woman' on a pedestal as a muse, an apparently superior being, which, however, had the effect of casting her as the passive material for art, the object of the gaze, while the male played the active, creative role. Nonetheless, the exhibition makes it clear that Surrealism was far from being monolithically patriarchal. change of emphasis: in recent years the charge of sexism, while often correct in itself, has often been levelled against avantparac movemcats in oract to sacar tock leftist politics. Giacometti: "Woman with her throat cur' by Night circle as younger lovers of older, tic careers. portive of these choices. The work of artists such as Desire thing to be radically critiqued. cruel to survive". repressive and reactionary role of he Catholic Church at the time is frequently alluded to in the works take on "essential" femininity. on show and in the labels, yet the empowering. mantis writhing on its back. lence done to her. This is a welcome photomontages:
In the case of the Surrealists, a number of women, such as Meret Oppenheim and Lee Miller, who may have made contact with the Surrealist established male artists, nevertheless were ove to acyclop tacir own artesAnd there is some eviacacc, as tae cataloguc pomts oute that the men could be actively supRemedios Varo, Lconor Fini and Leonora Carrington tends to take the Surrealist idealisation of women and its association of women with the night, mystery and nature, as a means of empowerment, rather than as some. Claude Cabun, 'Self portrait Fini's maintine The Ends of the Barth (1949) shows her naked, semi-immersed in dark waters while around her foat animal skulls representing the extinct male race, which she characterised as "too brutal and Nearby in the exhibition is Carrington's wooden idol, Cat Woman (1951) which likewise represents a positive In occasion issues of sexual incouality are skated over. The Alberto Giacometti's sculpture Ine scil. (1932) evinces that irritating post-Madonna tendency to find the most degrading representations of women to be in some way Here, the woman who has had her throat cut takes the form of a praying It may be important, as the catalogue does, to refer to the fact that female praying mantises devour their mates, so that she is "more than just a passive vicam, out it sooula be clear that the perception of the female as a tarcar nere oury serves to lexitmise ine vio D the Surrealists were uniformly homophobic. is alluded to in the catalogue, but there is much material on display by male as well as female Surrealists, which suggests that they frequently recognised the limitations of conventional heterosexual. ity and acknowledged that gender roles are fluid, not pregiven. Man Ray, for instance, photographed Marcel Duchamp as his female alter ego Rose Selavy ("Eros, c'est la vie", or "Eros, that's life"). In this context it is good to see photographs and photomontages by the recently rediscovered lesbian artist ano writer Clauae Canun which explore the idea of gender as a kind of masquerade chievous image of herself (Self-portrait, 1929), she dons a blond wig and beavy make-up in an elaborate chatade of doll-like femininity. One reason Cahun is currently fashionable among art historians is that her work seems to anticipate what are taken to be "postmodern" known statement about identity is "Under this mask stripping away all these faces". his is taken to mean that there is no "true" self underneath the shell of conventional identity - all one can do is replace it with another shell. This rather fits with current ideas of the self as just one more replaceable consumer item, like the clip-on face of a mobile phone.
Arguably, this approach presents a problem for marxists who subseribe to the notion of alienation, which after all involves the idea that the individual is alienated from his or her (true?) self under capitalism, and we should look towards the resolution of this fragmented condition in a socialist future.
Much Surrealist work seems to take this latter, more positive approach, in that the acknowledgement of unconscious desire in everyday life may at least imply the possibility of reconciliation with a repressed part of Yet some writing associated with Surrealism, such as that of the psychologist (now postmodernist founding-father) Tacques Lacan. suggests that desire itself is formed through the experience of "lack", through the sell's illusory search for authentication via the desired other. In the view of Lacan, particularly, the self is a fiction, which means that its desires will never be satisfied and it will never achiere coberence or autenticity.
Desire, then, is the single most important theme of Surrealism, has, up to a point, covered very thoroughly, incorporating works of film, photography, poetry and prose. it could also be accused of failing to high. light adequately the political context for the For example, Surrealism's links with marxexhibition and in the catalogue, but Dawn Ades writes of the Communist Party as though it were one monolithic entity throughout the interwar period which experienced no dissension or splits. The words "Stalin" or "Stalinism" do not even appear in the catalogue index.
Ades' refusal to register the crucial shifts in CP policy and ideology in this period makes it possible for her to come out with blanket statements such as "the surrealists agreed with marxism that female emancipation was debate among marxists on this point, espethe aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Fortunately, Jennifer Mundy offers a partial corrective to this view in her contribution.
I would certainly recommend this exhibition to anyone who can afford the high entrance charge (the concessionary rate 1s a generous £6.50!). Yet it leaves many questions about the relationship between desire and politics in Surrealism unanswered, perhaps in an attempt to accommodate to the acoa, aponacar bedonism waica is such a factor in contemporary culture.
As an antidore. ofter Michad Low's story about a conference in Cuba in the early sixties at which one of Trotsky's murderers, the Mexican painter David Siqueiros, was punched on the nose by a woman Surrealist, who informed him, "that's for Trotsky".
Outlook Debate capitalist government. -