Reviews for Enclosure

The average rating for Enclosure based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-05 00:00:00 Matt Bonkowski I dipped into this again as I was visiting the mountainous hometown of an infamous, paranoid and largely forgotten dictator. My guesthouse was the very definition of working class simplicity -- low ceilings, a small, almost frozen bedroom, and down the hall, a relatively cozy living room, where the TV and family portraits crowded next to a tiny stove. Strange to say, the only art on the walls were several posters by Dali. They were desert scenes -- a few eggs, some ants, along with apparently dreamlike figures scattered at some distance on vast bland canvases. The paintings reminded me of the pretentious emptiness of colourless mountain faces. As the book suggests, the surrealists were trying to achieve and manipulate the very moment where desire becomes imagination, often using found objects, but the sense of emptiness really just ends up producing a sense of frustration. Or paranoia. Dali explicitly pursued "simulations of paranoid states." The kind of paranoia that afflicts mountain people. The kind of paranoia that makes me want to finally read "The Shining", which was based entirely on Stephen King's impressions of one hotel in the mountains. The major leaders of surrealism spent time studying Freud after the remnants of WWI. As the book asks on page 1, "Have we sublimated those urges into new art forms and social expression?" The book doesn't say as much, but was sublimation of cultural, political, and violent impulses necessary after WWI. Did all the history of Europe have to be subsumed under a "new" and largely empty rubric of sexual desire, as is so often the case after destructive wars anyway? Is it just ridiculous and frustrating to reduce men to desire or sex drive alone, even if you make the claim that it drives imagination? In a cultural wasteland of nothing but found objects stripped of instrinsic meaning and constant, unexpressed desire, is not dictatorial paranoia the next step? It's apparently what happened to Dali, who later became a fascist in Spain. For example, your average teenager, who was the hero of early surrealists. Almost a hundred years later, without any wars raging in western Europe, European television is allowed to show nothing but porn and porn commercials for a mindless audience of perfect consumers. Sometimes it does, but haven't Europeans always known that sex doesn't start and stop world wars? The nature of teenagers (and, dare I say it, adults) is to be curious and aware of the profound and endless options in life, including sex, with sex and its responsibilities being a sort of exquisite death of every nebulous hope for something profound and lasting. For grown men, former foot soldiers of WWI, to have reduced art to eternal cognitive dissonance and desire in motion is a kind of violence of the human soul. It nominally appeals to college campuses, but only an idiot would believe that teenagers or anyone else needs to be reminded that sex is important. It is what importance to assign everything else which is the crux of the matter. I grew up in a working class family. It was a cultural wasteland of found objects, like the TV in the tiny living room which never stops running. Without the right or means to make real choices, people take whatever they're given -- a spoon, a lemon, and two hard boiled eggs -- and eat it anyway. Even to this day I still end up wherever the first bus in some country takes me. All potential desire, no real desire. This review of course is only a pale imitation of concepts which roiled in me while reading the first pages. I'd even started to take notes, planning to read the surrealists in the original. But some of those seminal texts form the second half of the book, and it is my misfortune to have first alighted on a manifesto describing the teenage idiot Rimbaud as examplar for a new age. Decades later, after Rimbaud had died a crippled minor business man and failed poet, somewhere in Africa I think, the "father" of surrealism, Breton, was still banging on about Rimbaud as the real spirit of surrealism. This book says several times that surrealism was ultimately a failure. Yet surrealism was still inspirational enough to have inspired the first half of this book, which should be torn from the second half, which consists entirely of surrealism manifestos, and left as a warning/ found object for people with nothing better to do in the mountains.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-25 00:00:00 Fred Lee Absolutely essential for any contemporary discourse on Surrealism! Nadeau's now-classic study champions the often repressed reminder that Surrealism was neither an aesthetic school nor a style of art but a political approach to culture and society. Written in a period when Surrealism still seemed touchable, if dead, but not "failed," Nadeau's study offers much to contextualize and also, strangely, humanize the many figures whose work and words constitute the body of the European Surrealist tradition. The timing comes with caveats: Nadeau's championship of the movement neglects to critically evaluate concerns that modern readers rightfully demand: gender and sex are severely undertheorized, for example. But Nadeau is very tough on the Surrealists in the categories which they themselves articulated as their concerns, which is an incredibly important and today often ignored critical role. You could say that he keeps them honest to their claims, if those words didn't constitute a horrifically bourgeois morality that all would disavow. Instead, let's say that he looks for patterns of consistency and change in order to match behaviour against manifesto. Highly recommended for anyone interested in Surrealism OR the political exchange of art and society in European radical traditions.