Chicago Surrealist Group

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The Chicago Surrealist Group was founded in July, 1966 by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont after a 1965 trip to Paris. Its initial members came from radical left-wing or anarchist backgrounds and had already participated in groups such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); indeed, the Chicago 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 "Totems Without Taboos," at the Heartland Cafe in Chicago.

It has sporadically published a newspaper entitled WHAT Are You Going To Do About It? and the journal Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion.

Participants in the group's activities have included Clarence John Laughlin, Gerome Kamrowski and Philip Lamantia. As participants past and present have been based in cities other than Chicago, the group has never been strictly defined by geography, despite its name. 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. The Rain Taxi Review of Books once described them as being in "aesthetic stasis" and having an "orthodox interpretation" of surrealism. There are also numerous criticisms and denouncements of the Chicago Surrealist Group included in the reference section of certain issues of Surrealist Subversion.

[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 0882863010