I will look at both kinds of looking, theirs and ours, that is, at what and how those whom we call surrealists saw, as if we could look through their eyes, and also what we see when looking at them and their gaze. Borrowing a properly surrealist optimism, I will interweave these looks and lookings. Surrealism still looks large from here. Whether we concentrate on its images of communicating vessels and glass houses or on its linguistic and famously visible gestures, they all seem to contain within them a kind of spaciousness, radiating the same spirit. Surrealist discourse expresses and incites to excess.
Surrealism causes problems.
It disturbs, as it wants to, even now. It calls upon whatever energies we have to reread it. It is not, any more than Dada, a movement that wants to put itself or the observer at ease. I differ from those who construe Dada as totally negative and surrealism as positive. Surrealism absorbed much dadaist energy, which its own contradictory tendencies were able to sustain.