Chicago Surrealist Group

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The Chicago Surrealist Group was founded in July, 1966 by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, after their 1965 trip to Paris where they attended meetings of the Paris Surrealist Group and met André Breton and Guy Debord [1]. Its initial members came from radical backgrounds such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and indeed the Chicago Surrealist Group edited an issue of Radical America, the SDS journal.

The group played a major role in organizing the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago, the surrealist issue of the journal Race Traitor, and the first exhibition of exquisite corpses in the United States, "Totems Without Taboos," at the Heartland Cafe in Chicago.

It has published a sporadically-appearing newspaper, WHAT Are You Going To Do About It? and journal, Arsenal/Surrealist Subversions.

Among the participants in the group's activities have been Clarence John Laughlin, Gerome Kamrowski and Philip Lamantia. As these participants were based in other cities may show, the group has always had a not strictly geographically-limited delineation. The group has worked with others, such as the Stockholm Surrealist Group, with which it met in Chicago and Stockholm in 1986, publishing the International Surrealist Bulletin No. 1.[1]

The Chicago Surrealist Group has been frequently criticised; for instance, described by Rain Taxi Review of Books as in "aesthetic stasis" and having an "orthodox interpretation" of surrealism. There are also numerous criticisms and denouncements of the Chicago Surrealist Group in the reference section of the book Surrealist Subversions.

[edit] Sources

1. Rosemont, Franklin and Charles Radcliffe. Dancin' in the Streets: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists and Provos in the 1960s as Recorded in the Pages of Rebel Worker and Heatwave, Charles H Kerr. 2005. ISBN 08822863010