Outlook mental health system, which provided no follow-up after his breakdowm in March. He was particularty let down by the 'specialist he went to for treatment of chronic fatigue. This man put him on a combination of anti-depressants, something regarded as dangerous in clinical psychiatry (See British National Formulary Section 4.3) because of the risk of triggering a manic attack -induding by the so-called 'safe" SS's (the Prozac-type drugs) But he would not take calls from Ceri's partner when he reacted badly to the doubling of a drug dose in February.
This negligence was exacerbated by the stigma attached to mental illness, which inhibits discussion of mental ill health, drug treatments and their associated risks. If we are to avoid similar tragedies in the future, the left must take up the fight for user-led mental health services; and deal with mental illness if it arises in our cum lives and the lives of our friends in an informed and candid way.
The mark of Ceri's contribution, and the deep respect and love with which he was held by friends and comrades alke, was evident at a memorial meeting held in Pontypridd just two weeks after his death. Close to 100 attended. Moving and often inspining tributes were paid to his memory; and messages of condolence male won weetea cus A Ceri Evans Memorial Fund was launched, with a view to publishing a collection of his writings Where do we go from here? One of Ceri's closest comrades reminded us at the memorial of Trotsky's words, written shortly before his assassination in 1940, with which Ceri, even right at the end, would have agreed: "Life is beauciful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it Honouring Cert's memory surely means taking this message to our hearts, and fighting to realise it.
Thursday, 29 August 2002 I feel obliged to reply to Jane Kelly's letter in response to my article Politics of Surrealism' (SO No.SS May-June ples of Surrealism's shortcomings - the role of women, and Breton's attitude to homosexual ly. She uses these examples to imply that while coming "very close to Trotsky's politics in the 1950s, the Surrealists were realy a rather reactionary I'll deal with Breton's "homophobia" first. Breton personally found it difficult to deal with the question of homosexuality, it's also at one weed number of openly gay and bisexual members of the Paris arcle - they remained Breton's close allies and were fully accepted as group members.
Earty on in the life of the Paris Sebated, in a way that was quite remarkable for its time -Dear Cuttoos Whether specific bourgeois feminist criticisms of Surrealism are just or untust (and some of them are likely that they have partially flled a space left by the omissions of Marxist theory and historiography on these questions), I think that there is value in conducting a socialist feminist critique of Surrealism, or, more broadly, a critique in the light of the enrichment of Marxism by work on special oppression since the 1960s and 1970s.
Jay says, for example, that attitude towards homosexuality is "naive, given what most revolutionaries attirudes were up until the sixties.
But it is not either naive or moralistic to do this, if we genuinely think that Breton and others were wrong.
Marxism is a materialist method for discorering the Letters/Culture this was 1928, not 1968 (see "Investigating Sex, Verso, 1992).
Jane is perhaps being naive when she criticises Breton for his views on the subject, ghen that most revolutionaries up to the 1960s tended to accept the Freudian view of homosexual.
Andre Breton (leff) with Diego Rivera and Trotsky (right) truth - its business is to identify past mistakes and analyse why they were made, in order to avoid repeating them.
For instance, it's arguable that no Marxist in the USSR in 1920-22 had adequate theoretical tools with which to grasp the phenomenon of Would we leave it there, simply sayicy as probiemat (even if they were liberal enoush on the legal position of gays). reton must be seen time if we are to approach him from a moralistic, abstract) Jane's comments on the position of Surrealist movement seem to echo the studies by bourgeois feminist critics that came out in the 1980s - studies that were just as hostile to revothey were to Surrealism. The notion that women were oppressed felowtravellers within the movement has fallen work has been done on the queston Penelope Rosemont's recent collection of writing by women Surrealists - Surresist Women - An International Anthology' (University of Texas Press. 1998) - firmly and definitively which I have just been reading about. The Surrealists rightly condemned the French Colonial Exposition of 1931 for turning the cultures or coonisco peopic: into an exotic spectacle. out that they perpetrated own deployment of "indigenous art in the context of the anti-imperialist counterburies the myth that women were junior partners.
True, this is often how they by academics, by male art critcs, by bourgeois feminists -vested interest in denigrating the exceptional work (in both the visual and poetic fields) that women Surrealists had done. But within the groups themselves women often played a key role.
One final point. Jane claims that "few (women Surrealists] confronted their own, female sexuality in the way that Bellmer, with his Dolls, investigated his male sexuality. " Now this is a bizarre statement.
The paintings of Dorothea Tanning (see for example "Birthday'" 1942), the self-portraits of the bisexual female photographer Claude Cahun (exploring sexual roles and masks). the novels of the contemporary writer Rikki Ducomet - these are more or less random samples of the incredibly powerful, diverse and brave work produced by women Surrealists in this area. Here as elsewhere I End Jane's criticisms unsustainable Jay Woolrich, Leicester African and other art from their own collections during the Exposition?* Should we say that it is "naïve" or anachronistic to criticise the Surrealists with the bencfit of hindsight - or should we do just that, taking full advantage of later studies (often no doubt very bourgeois) on Western cultural appropriation and the pouties ou museum display? Beyond this, I feel that there is a danger the polarised between those is in its essence reacrevolutionary.
What if it's neither? What if "it" has the potentiality to go in a number of directions?
Perhaps Surrealism, like Marxism, is above all a and cannot be reified as a fixed thing.
revolu tionary method?! I would Comradely Andrew Kennedy * Information is trom an article by Jody Blake in the January Oxford Art Journal.