Monday 19 December 2016

Exciting New Additions: Surrealist Journal BIEF

The archive has been gradually accumulating a small but growing collection of holdings from some of the more obscure groupings of the 'high modernist' avant-garde of the early 20th Century, and of late Surrealism. Here are a few more additions to the the latter:


Bief ("Connector") was published by the Paris Surrealist group from 1958–1960. Both its title and subtitle ("Surrealist Junction") underscore its primary role of serving as a conduit between the Paris group and the widely-scattered international Surrealist community, which had grown to include dozens of local groups in North and South America, Africa, and Europe; indeed, by the 1950s it could be argued that Paris was no longer the centre of Surrealist activity, which flourished in the Caribbean and Latin America. As a result, these issues display a constant concern with anti-colonial struggle and contain many contributions from Surrealists working in the French colonies and former colonies, including Joyce Monsour and Robert Benayoun.
 
 The Revenant Archive currently holds four issues, one third of the magazine's run.

Bief: Jonction Surrealiste. ed. Gérard Legrand. No. 4, Feb. 15, 1959. Le Terrain Vague: Paris. Softcover Quarto, 12 pp.


 

Highlights include: a statement by Benjamin Péret about the Church, the Military, and Colonialism; an André Breton essay, 'En Vrac' (In Shambles); three poems by Martiniquan poetess Joyce Mansour; an attack on Abstract Expressionism by Jean Schuster, and a study by Elie-Charles Flamand 'Sur un cryptogramme Nervalien' (On a Nervalian Cryptogram).
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Bief: Jonction Surrealiste. ed. Gérard Legrand. No. 5, March 15, 1959. Le Terrain Vague: Paris. Softcover Quarto, 12 pp.


 
Highlights include: An essay on the I-Ching by Moroccan Surrealist Robert Benayoun, poems by Egyptian Surrealist Joyce Mansour, several open letters from various Surrealist groups, and an essay by Gérard Legrand:  "Is God a Positivist?"

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Bief: Jonction Surrealiste. ed. Gérard Legrand. No. 8, July 15, 1959. Le Terrain Vague: Paris. Softcover Quarto, 12 pp.


 
Highlights include: A feminist text by Joyce Mansour, a statement supporting Algeria's rebellion against French occupation, a text on Surrealism's relationship to Zen Buddhism by Guy Cabanel, a visual poem-essay by the Croatian Surrealist Radovan Ivsic, an essay on Nabokov's Lolita by Robert Benayoun, an attack on the Cubist poets for selling out, and another against Chagall, and an essay by Gérard Legrand on the intersection of avant-garde linguistics, mysticism, and psychoanalysis,

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Bief: Jonction Surrealiste. ed. Gérard Legrand. No. 12, April 15, 1960. Le Terrain Vague: Paris. Softcover Quarto, 12 pp.


This is the final issue of the journal. Highlights include: an index of all texts published during the journal's run, an essay by Breton on Marxist theory, with a reproduced letter to him from Trotsky, a drawing by Matta, an announcement of an exhibition by Belgian Surrealist Toyen, a contentious essay regarding censorship of an upcoming edition of Artaud and the psychiactric measures applied to him during his incarceration at Rodez, and an international collection of definitions (in French) of Surrealism by Joyce Mansour (Egypt), Robert Benayoun (Morocco/France), Octavio Paz (Mexico), Nora Mitrani (Bulgaria), and the Franco-English Surrealist Jacques Brunius, who had broadcast them in English in a BBC broadcast on the movement that February.

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