"Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all," declared André Breton in 1928. The aesthetic of convulsive beauty both inspired and problematized much of Surrealist art. From the overcharged fetish to the surreal sense of the sublime, which they called the marvelous, convulsive beauty proved to be more a seductive strategy than a definable signified. Put into play, an aesthetic of convulsive beauty not only transgressed the boundaries of an academic "Beauty" but the boundaries of rationality and formal logic, as well. In fact, convulsive beauty disrupted the very question of boundaries or classifications. As if mimicking the female hysterics that the surrealists loved so dearly ("we who like nothing so much as youthful hysterics"), the surrealists used a strategy of convulsive beauty to "hystericize" aesthetic, social, and ideological norms by calling all such assumptions into question. Hysteria is precisely that "which escapes definition." For the surrealists, hysteria was "not a pathological phenomenon" and should "be considered in every respect a supreme means of expression."
This art history seminar set out to "hystericize" the notion of convulsive beauty itself, questioning its premises and practice by the Surrealists and extending its play to our own postmodern context. The site chosen again and again by the surrealists for playing out the aesthetic of convulsive beauty was the female body, which they doubled, fragmented, and fetishized into bits and pieces. "The problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world," proclaimed Breton, implying that the problem of woman is not one the surrealists really wanted to solve. The sense here is that the woman is marvelous precisely because she is disturbing; thus, the more disturbing she is made to appear, the more marvelous she will be. The surrealists were heavily invested in keeping the woman "other," in keeping the "woman problem" a problem. We were curious to see if there were other ways to think "other." How might the body be referenced without being represented simply as an object for the gaze? How might we return the voyeuristic look with a gaze that reverses subject/object positions? Could the fetish be feminized? We looked at the strategies implicit in Freudís dream logic: displacement, condensation, and symbol. From a more postmodern context, we looked at Jacques Lacanís Mirror Stage defining an Imaginary constructed out of the split subject and its specular other, as well as Jean Baudrillardís essays on the hyperreal, simulations, and seduction, which threatens every discourse with a sudden reversibility of signs through "the ability to turn appearances in on themselves, to play on the bodyís appearances . . ." We also questioned gender differences, not only between the binary constructs of masculinity and femininity, but the play of difference within each term of that equation, as well. We decided, thus, not to mount a single-sex show looking at Surrealism and gender from only one side of this divide, since we were questioning that dichotomy itself.
The call was for contemporary works of diverse media that continue to explore, extend, extol or deconstruct a convulsive beauty that can be linked back to the issues of Surrealism and gender. What we received was an amazingly diverse body of works assembled here not to pin down the concept of convulsive beauty so much as to open it up to further question by putting its strategies into play.
The exhibition and the web-catalogue were the collective work of students in Art History 497/Art 611, "Surrealism and
Gender in a Postmodern Context," taught by Dr. Karen L. Kleinfelder at California State University, Long Beach, during the
1999 Fall semester. Class members included:
Ulla Barr, Melissa Maxfield Beall, Charlene Boehne, Kristen Brown, Carrie J. Cason, Denise Dangora, Judy Ditzenberger Ward ,Mary Dixon, Kristi Genoway, Meaghan Gower, Penelope Greeven, Sue Hall, Ezra Homann, Carolyn Laliberte, Carrie Lincourt, Beatriz Macias, Julie McManus, Christine Mickey, Lorraine Murphy, Heather Richards, Kelly Rockwell, Jenny Sedo, Dominic Szeto, Jennifer Toohey, Sonia Valdivia, April Van Wie, Joyce Weiss, Bonnie Yoon, Deborah Young