(Berkeley, CA) August 21, 2019—This fall, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and City Lights Booksellers and Publishers are partnering on a major arts and literary festival that celebrates the one hundredth anniversary of Surrealism. Inside the Magnetic Fields: Surrealism @ 100 illuminates the legacy of this transformative movement, which has influenced generations of writers, artists, filmmakers, performers, and scholars across multiple continents. Reflecting Surrealism’s multidisciplinary history, Inside the Magnetic Fields encompasses an expansive program of lectures, panel discussions, film screenings, and performances, as well as two significant art exhibitions at BAMPFA—including the museum’s flagship fall exhibition Strange, an expansive historical survey of global art and film highlighting works that resonate with a surrealist sensibility.

Originating in Europe during the early interwar period, Surrealism began as a literary movement focused on exploration of the unconscious mind. Inside the Magnetic Fields takes its name from the English translation of Les Champs magnétiques, a novel co-written by André Breton and Philippe Soupault that was published in 1919 and is generally identified as the first work of literary Surrealism. Breton later went on to author the Surrealist Manifesto, accelerating the cross-disciplinary influence of a creative movement driven by the aesthetic potential of irrational thought and imagery.

Inside the Magnetic Fields features more than a dozen readings and panel discussions in multiple locations across San Francisco and Berkeley, highlighting diverse surrealist tendencies from different national and historical origins. The programs place special emphasis on underrepresented elements of the Surrealist movement, including significant representation from artists and authors of the developing world. Notable speakers include Will Alexander, Jacquelynn Baas, Carolyn Burke, James Leo Cahill, Garrett Caples, Gillian Conoley, Andrew Joron, Stuart Kendall, Susan Laxton, Peter Maravelis, Penelope Rosemont, and Jennifer Shaw; several of these participants will deliver remarks at the festival keynote symposium, held at UC Berkeley on Saturday, November 16 and organized by Rob Kaufman, an associate professor in the University’s Comparative Literature department. Other notable highlights include:

• Saturday, November 9 – Women in Surrealism: A panel discussion about the understudied contributions of female Surrealist writers and artists
• Sunday, November 17 – Beats & Surrealism:A conversation about the creative exchanges between Surrealist authors and San Francisco’s iconic Beat Generation
• Wednesday, November 20 – Jacquelyn Baas in Person: A reading at BAMPFA by the museum’s director emeritus Jacquelyn Baas from her new book Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life, which will also receive a book launch party at City Lights on November 10

A full schedule of live events during Inside the Magnetic Fields follows below and can be found at citylights.com.

In conjunction with the Festival, BAMPFA is mounting two major exhibitions of work this fall that evoke the spirit of the Surrealist movement. From August 21 through January 5, the museum’s main gallery is devoted to Strange, a massive survey of over 100 works from BAMPFA’s collection that evoke a sense of irrationality, mysteriousness, and the uncanny. Extending beyond the historical boundaries of Surrealism per se, the exhibition encompasses five hundred years of art from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, including both self-identified Surrealists and artists from other historical moments such as Diane Arbus, William Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Francisco Goya, René Magritte, Maruyama Okyo, Ariel Parkinson, Maija Peeples-Bright, Cindy Sherman, Jack Smith, and Ruth Wall. BAMPFA will present a full slate of lectures, exhibitions, and gallery tours in conjunction with Strange, which are described below and online.

Complementing the exhibition, BAMPFA is also mounting a film series, Strange: Surrealist Tendencies in Cinema, which screens concurrently with the live event program of Inside the Magnetic Fields. Reflecting the Festival’s global scope, the series opens with the Filipino Surrealist film Perfumed Nightmare (1977), which imbues an incisive critique of colonialism with magic, humor, and interstellar ambition. Also included in the series are two short film programs: “Still Raining Still Dreaming”, which features surreal experimental films by the celebrated avant-garde directors Joseph Cornell, Phil Solomon, Lawrence Jordan, and Shambhavi Kaul; and “Sidney Peterson’s San Francisco Surrealism”, dedicated to works made by the Bay Area Surrealist filmmaker with his students at the California School of Fine Arts in the 1940s. Surrealism, from classic to contemporary, is also the focus of three programs in BAMPFA’s annual Alternative Visions series earlier in the fall; screening dates and descriptions for both these series follow below and are available online.

One of the artists featured in Strange, Sylvia Fein, is also the subject of a focused survey at BAMPFA this fall, as part of the museum’s MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art. On view from November 13 through March 1, Sylvia Fein / MATRIX 275 celebrates the work of the Martinez-based painter, who turns 100 in 2019 and was a leading force in the Wisconsin-based Midwest Surrealist movement of the 1940s. Working primarily in the fourteenth-century medium of egg tempera, Fein’s paintings alternate between symbolic figurative imagery and fantastical images of disembodied eyes or flaming towers, which have been shown alongside work by other Surrealists of her generation such as Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo. Fein’s survey at BAMPFA presents more thirty works made by the artist over a seventy-year period.

“We’re delighted to partner with our friends at City Lights Books to reignite the spirit of Surrealism in the Bay Area, a region whose atmosphere of creative innovation and intellectual ferment aligns perfectly with the movement’s founding ideals,” said BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder, who curated Sylvia Fein / MATRIX 275 and co-curated Strange. “As the only museum in the United States that is equally dedicated to art and film, BAMPFA is uniquely equipped to partner with one of San Francisco’s most beloved literary arts institutions to present a celebration of Surrealism across a broad spectrum of creative disciplines.”

Individual event descriptions for Inside the Magnetic Fields follow below. Programs are subject to change: for a current list of events, visit citylights.com.

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Tuesday / 11.5.19 / 7:00 PM
The Literary Roots of Surrealism

City Lights Booksellers

With Will Alexander, Garrett Caples, Norma Cole, Gillian Conoley, David Coulter, Dia Felix, Michael Palmer. A literary sampler of Surrealist texts throughout the decades.

Wednesday / 11.6.19 / 7:00 PM
Screening: Perfumed Nightmare (Kidlat Tahimik, Philippines, 1977)

BAMPFA

Perfumed Nightmare “reminds one that invention, insolence, enchantment, even innocence, are still available to film,” Susan Sontag wrote. It merges reverie and documentary as jeepney driver “Kidlat Tahimik” dreams of a trip to the moon. Tahimik’s surreal ethnography finds wonder and mystery both at home in the Philippines and in Europe, where his ambition guides him. Critic Gene Youngblood described Perfumed Nightmare as “a bizarre, hallucinatory movie full of dazzling images and outlandish ideas. It’s both real and surreal, poetic and political, naive and wise, primitive and supremely accomplished . . . a dazzling testament to the liberty of the imagination.” 

Thursday / 11.7.19 / 7:00 PM
The BEATS & Surrealism: Bob Kaufman & Philip Lamantia

City Lights Booksellers

Garrett Caples and Will Alexander discuss the connections between the BEATS and Surrealism. City Lights celebrates the release of two new books:

The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman

Edited by Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, and Tate Swindell

published by City Lights Books

and

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

Edited by Garrett Caples and Nancy J. Peters

Published by University of California Press

Friday / 11.8.19 / 7:00 PM
Screening: Still Raining Still Dreaming
BAMPFA

Uncanny landscapes and mysterious journeys emerge in these five works constructed from repurposed materials. Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart distills the 1931 B movie East of Borneo into an uncanny twenty-minute ode to the eponymous actress. Phil Solomon’s Last Days in a Lonely Place and Still Raining Still Dreaming take place in the eerie digital landscapes between the action in Grand Theft Auto. In Our Lady of the Sphere Lawrence Jordan animates Victorian engravings to suggest exotic anachronistic journeys. Shambhavi Kaul’s Mount Song traverses depopulated environments from various films, whose constructed landscapes evoke places imagined and remembered. 

Last Days in a Lonely Place (Phil Solomon, US, 2007)
Our Lady of the Sphere (Lawrence Jordan, US, 1969)
Mount Song (Shambhavi Kaul, US, 2013)
Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, US, 1936)

Still Raining Still Dreaming (Phil Solomon, US, 2008)

Saturday / 11.9.19 / 1:00 PM
Surrealist Women 
Weinstein Gallery, 444 Clementina Street, San Francisco

Session One: “La Femme Surréaliste? Women in and out of Surrealism" with Carolyn Burke

From Mina Loy to Lee Miller, Carolyn Burke examine the life and work of two women at the center of Surrealist culture.

Session Two: “Simone Breton and Early Automatism” with Abigail Susik

Exploring the emergence of automatism and the role of Simone Breton, partner of Andre Breton.

Session Three: “Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh” with Anne Walsh

Video and performance artist Anne Walsh's encounter with and multipart response to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington's novelThe Hearing Trumpet.

Session Four: Panel Discussion with Carolyn Burke, Abigail Susik, and Anne Walsh

Saturday / 11.9.19 / 7:30 PM
Art as a Weapon: John Heartfield’s Life, Work, and Legacy 
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery St, San Francisco

An interactive presentation of images and stories by John Heartfield’s grandson, also known as John Heartfield, the curator of the John Heartfield Exhibition, an Online Platform promoting the work of one of the greatest collage artists, activists, and creators of anti-nazi agit-prop. John Heartfield’s life was cinematic. His artistic output was prolific and revolutionary. Many of today’s finest political artists around the world consider his work to be their most important influence. Heartfield pioneered the art form “photomontage” (photo surrealism). A lifelong pacificist, Heartfield used scissors and paste to create unforgettable images as a successful weapon against one of the most powerful propaganda machines the world has ever known. His art stood as a testament against the Nazi regime during the darkest time in World War Two.

Sunday / 11.10.19 / 5:00 PM
Duchamp, Bataille, and the Surrealist Exhibition of 1938 
City Lights Booksellers

With Jacquelynn Baas, celebrating the release of her new book Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life, published by The MIT Press.

Considered by many to be the most important artist of the twentieth century, the object of intensive critical scrutiny and extensive theorizing, Marcel Duchamp remains an enigma. He may be the most intellectual artist of all time; and yet, toward the end of his life, he said, “If you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual or cerebral.” In Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life, Jacquelynn Baas offers a groundbreaking new reading of Duchamp, arguing in particular that his work may have been informed by Asian “esoterism,” energetic spiritual practices that identify creative energy with the erotic impulse.

Sunday / 11.10.19 / 7:00 PM
Screening: Sidney Peterson’s San Francisco Surrealism 
BAMPFA

Invited to teach the first-ever filmmaking classes at the California School of Fine Arts, Sidney Peterson made a series of dazzlingly strange and wonderful films in which poetic intelligence, radical experimentation, and the students’ exuberant energy transformed San Francisco into bizarre dreamscapes. Balzac meets Picasso in Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur; in The Cage an eyeball escapes its socket and is pursued through the city. The Petrified Dog shows the strange world of adults through the mind of an eight-year-old girl, and The Lead Shoes accompanies an oblique oedipal drama with two murder ballads set to a propulsive score. 

Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur (US, 1949)
The Cage (US, 1947)
The Petrified Dog (US, 1948)
The Lead Shoes (US, 1949)

Monday / 11.11.19 / 7:00 PM

Ecstatic Transgression: The Queer Surrealism of Pierre Molinier, with Peter Maravelis

Location TBA

Pierre Molinier was a French painter, photographer, and radical fetishist who had initially been accepted by Andre Breton as a Surrealist painter, but once discovering Molinier’s more extreme and sexually explicit work, distanced himself. Molinier experimented with gender identity, explicit forms of fetishism, autoeroticism, and explored the connections between religious rituals and sexuality. Announcing himself a lesbian, he explored the fluidity of his transsexual orientation, and produced a unique body of work that crossed over between sado-masochism and an interest in shamanic and transpersonal explorations. Contemporary artists such as Ron Athey and Cindy Sherman have cited him as an influence. The evenings talk will include many images of his paintings, photographs, and personal photos, offering a timeline of his life, and attempting to place him in the larger context of twentieth century art that includes such schools as the Viennese Aktionists and others.

Tuesday / 11.12.19 / 7:00 PM

The Zoological Surrealism of Jean Painlevé, with James Lee Cahill

City Lights Booksellers

Before Jacques-Yves Cousteau, there was Jean Painlevé, a pioneering French scientific and nature filmmaker with a Surrealist’s eye. Creator of more than two hundred films, his studies of strange animal worlds doubled as critical reimaginations of humanity. With an unerring eye for the uncanny and unexpected, Painlevé and his assistant Geneviève Hamon captured oneiric octopuses, metamorphic crustaceans, erotic seahorses, mythic vampire bats, and insatiable predatory insects.

Zoological Surrealism draws from French scientific and nature filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s early oeuvre to rethink the entangled histories of cinema, Surrealism, and scientific research in interwar France. Delving deeply into Painlevé’s archive, James Leo Cahill develops an account of “cinema’s Copernican vocation”—how it was used to forge new scientific discoveries while also displacing and critiquing anthropocentric viewpoints.

From Painlevé’s engagements with Sergei Eisenstein, Georges Franju, and competing Surrealists to the historiographical dimensions of Jean Vigo’s concept of social cinema, Zoological Surrealism taps never-before-examined sources to offer a completely original perspective on a cutting-edge filmmaker. The first extensive English-language study of Painlevé’s early films and their contexts, it adds important new insight to our understanding of film while also contributing to contemporary investigations of the increasingly surreal landscapes of climate change and ecological emergency.

Tuesday / 11.12.19 / 8:30 PM

A Cacaphonous Surreality

Location TBA

Members of San Francisco Cacaphony present an opportunity for the curious to explore the depths of their innermost yearnings, desires, and hidden meanings. Details to come.

Wednesday / 11.13.19 / 6:30 PM

Impossible Surrealism: Georges Bataille and the Surrealist Demand, with Stuart Kendall

Mechanics’ Institute Library, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco

Though never an official member of the Surrealist group, Georges Bataille shared its fundamental cry of revolt even as he styled himself as its enemy within. Mild-mannered librarian by day, debauched libertine by night, Bataille authored several classic works of pornographic literature, political economy, sacred sociology, and atheological autobiography, all of which carry the Surrealist ambition. This talk will trace Bataille’s engagement with Surrealism from the 1920s to the 1950s, through Documents, Acéphale, and The Accursed Share.

Thursday / 11.14.19 / 7:00 PM

Surrealism at Play, with Susan Laxton

City Lights Booksellers

In Surrealism at Play, Susan Laxton writes a new history of surrealism in which she traces the centrality of play to the movement and its ongoing legacy. For surrealist artists, play took a consistent role in their aesthetic as they worked in, with, and against a post-World War I world increasingly dominated by technology and functionalism. Whether through exquisite-corpse drawings, Man Ray’s rayographs, or Joan Miró’s visual puns, surrealists became adept at developing techniques and processes designed to guarantee aleatory outcomes. In embracing chance as the means to produce unforeseeable ends, they shifted emphasis from final product to process, challenging the disciplinary structures of industrial modernism. As Laxton demonstrates, play became a primary method through which Surrealism refashioned artistic practice, everyday experience, and the nature of subjectivity.

Friday / 11.15.19 / 6:30 PM

Hans Winkler/ Surrealism/DADA : Baroque, with Hans Winkler

Goethe Institut San Francisco, 530 Bush Street, San Francisco

A lecture/performance presenting the avant-garde sensibilities of the baroque time, and that of Surrealism/Dadaism. Mr. Winkler consideres their goals and forms of work. Images and original texts of different artists and writers will make the parallels of these movements visible, including Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, Baudelaire, Giorgio de Chirico, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Walter Serner, Andrea Pozzo, Tommaso Campanella, Salvator Rosa and Friedrich Nietzsche. Five projects by Hans Winkler will be displayed during the lecture: realized performances which deal with the questions of the Baroque period, as well as the Surrealism, in different artistic ways.

Friday / 11.15.19 / 9:00 PM

The Ascendance of Claude Araxe: A Dionysian Invocation

Location Undisclosed (by invitation)

An ecstatic ode to the Acéphale impulse. A reawakening of Claude Araxe (known alternately as Laure, or Colette Peignot) in all her furious majesty. A shattering of the patriarchal order and its imprint on the Surrealist tradition. 

Prepare oneself as one would when entering a church, or perhaps an orgy. Select a color, dress monochromatically, and invoke all that honors the High Revolutionary Femme as you adorn yourself. Masks are encouraged. Our exaltations will commence outdoors under the shadow of night; be prepared to ascend a long, winding staircase. 

Invitations to this event become available at the front counter at City Lights on October 13, 2019. No reservations accepted. Seating limited and on a first come first serve basis. More information on this event to be announced.

Saturday / 11.16.19 / 2:00 PM

Surrealism Then, Now: Snapshots of Critically Engaged Art 

370 Dwinelle Hall, University of California Berkeley Campus

This afternoon symposium and discussion will feature two panels of literary and cultural critics who'll reconsider Surrealism: its histories, it afterlives, and its resonances in art and politics today. Participants will offer brief presentations that rethink the work of Surrealist and Surrealist-influenced art in Europe; in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas; and in North Africa. The Symposium will also involve extensive discussion among the panelists and audience. Panelists from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Cornell University will include Catherine Flynn, Donna V. Jones, Robert Kaufman, David Marriott, Natalie Melas, Soraya Tlatli, and Nathaniel Wolfson.

Saturday / 11.16.19 / 1:00 PM

Exquisite Corpse Workshop

BAMPFA

To celebrate the centennial of Surrealism, poet Rod Roland and daughter Coco lead an all-ages workshop in creating collaborative drawings and pieces of writing using the Surrealist technique of the exquisite corpse.  In their words, written as an exquisite corpse: Exercise your brain and creativity / the light from an oyster / make friends / voyage through alchemy in a tiny boat / So Much Fun! / The / sequences illustrate our mind / Learn new art skills / Two-way mirror to see the inside of a turtle shell / Do whatever you want! / Everyone writes a line that is so cool / It does not matter what you do!

Saturday / 11.16.19 / 7:30 PM

The Hyena Debutante Comes Out

Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco

An interactive ritual musical theatre experience honoring the centennial of Leonora Carrington’s birth.

The poles unfold and time collapses into a cauldron of wild, steaming, snorting wonder as a cackling, fluttering herd of beasts arises to celebrate the feminine glory of our beloved Ancestress, Leonora Carrington.

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was hailed as an important Surrealist, though she rejected that label herself and did whatever she damn well pleased. She painted, wrote, sculpted, and produced theatre pieces exploring the themes of alchemy, spiritualism, mythology, and nature—with astonishing delicacy, profound attention to detail, and a wicked grin. During her life she was banished from her aristocratic family in England, fled to Southern France with Max Ernst, escaped torture and madness in Spain, and then found a final home and family in Mexico City. Throughout her days, Leonora startled, enchanted, and illuminated all in her path.

Sunday / 11.17.19 / 1:00 PM

A Surrealist Exploring Consciousness Studies: Gordon Onslow Ford, with Fariba Bogzaran

Weinstein Gallery, 444 Clementina Street, San Francisco

Gordon Onslow Ford was one of the last surviving members of the 1930s Paris Surrealist group surrounding André Breton. Born in the English town of Wendover in 1912 to a family of artists, Onslow Ford began painting at an early age. His grandfather, Edward Onslow Ford, was a Victorian sculptor. In his lifetime, Gordon Onslow Ford cofounded, together with Robert Anthoine and Fariba Bogzaran, The Lucid Art Foundation. The mission of the Lucid Art Foundation is to explore the phenomena of the inner worlds and deep levels of consciousness through visual arts, spontaneous painting, writings, and other means to make visible the otherwise invisible, creating an inclusive way of seeing that is in harmony with the natural world of which we are a part. This talk will explore Surrealism in its relation to consciousness expansion and the mapping of states of mind.

Sunday / 11.17.19 / 5:00 PM

El Surrealismo en México: Histories, Reflections, Engagements

San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco

Mexico was a rich medium for the Surrealists. Throughout the course of the last century, such influential figures as Leonora Carrington, Andre Breton, Wolfgang Paalen, Remedios Varo, and many others either passed through or made their home in Mexico City. Although Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera take a great deal of the spotlight, there were many other who created vital work and contributed to the arts and culture of Mexico. In this afternoon’s lecture, Professor Arturo Dávila-Sánchez will explore the rich history of a lesser know but important part of Surrealism’s historical continuum.

Sunday / 11.17.19 / 8:00 PM

Surreal Music

Live Worms Gallery, 1345 Grant Ave, San Francisco

An evening with Allison Lovejoy and Friends. Exploring the music of Eric Satie, Edgard Varèse, Charles Ives, and others. Details TBA.

Monday / 11.18.19 / 7:00 PM

Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore: Surrealism Otherwise, with Jennifer Shaw

City Lights Booksellers

Lovers, step-sisters, and artistic collaborators, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore were not typical Surrealists. They were never part of a Surrealist group, but surrealist strategies were crucial not only to their artistic work but to their resistance to the Nazis on occupied Jersey. In this talk, scholar Jennifer Shaw will discuss the complex and critical relationship between their artistic and political strategies and Surrealism.

Join us at BAMPFA for a costumed fête in celebration of universal joyfulness, unbridled spontaneity, startling juxtapositions, and 100 years of Surrealism. 

The party will feature live musical performances, theatrical photo ops, specialty cocktails, and unusual bites. Guests will enjoy after-hours access to all current BAMPFA exhibits including Strange, an exhibition exploring improbable, uncanny, mysterious, and miraculous sources of artistic inspiration and featuring works that resonate with the spirit of Surrealism.

Let your dreams inspire your dress. We welcome the mythic, the magical, the grotesque, the funny, the peculiar, and the unique. This will be an evening where strange is celebrated. Proceeds from this event will support of BAMPFA’s education and community programs.

Tickets will go on sale at bampfa.org on September 20. VIP tickets include an exclusive and intimate Surrealist dinner hosted by the chefs at Babette. Seating is very limited, don’t wait to purchase. For sponsorship opportunities and Surreal Dinner tables, please email mberek@berkeley.edu.

Wednesday / 11.20.19 / 12:30 PM

Reading: Jacquelynn Baas on Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life

BAMPFA

Former BAMPFA director Jacquelynn Baas presents her groundbreaking new book Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life—which makes the case for Asian spiritual practices as an influence on the artist’s work—with an illustrated introduction and reading. 

Wednesday / 11.20.19 / 7:00 PM

Penelope Rosemont and Abigail Susik in conversation

City Lights Booksellers

One of the hallmarks of Surrealism is the encounter, often by chance, with a key person, place, or object through a trajectory no one could have predicted. Penelope Rosemont draws on a lifetime of such experiences in her collection of essays, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields published by City Lights Books. From her youthful forays as a radical-student in Chicago to her pivotal meeting with André Breton and the Surrealist Movement in Paris, Rosemont—one of the movement's leading exponents in the United States—documents her unending search for the marvelous and the avant-garde.

Noted surrealist scholar Abigail Susik discusses with Penelope Rosemont her friendships with some of the movement's most important visual artists, such as Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Mimi Parent, and Toyen; discussing politics and spectacle with Guy Debord; and crossing paths with poet Ted Joans and outsider artist Lee Godie. The book also includes scholarly investigations into American radicals like George Francis Train and Mary MacLane, the myth of the Golden Goose, and Dada precursor Emmy Hennings.

Image Credit

Blythe Bohnen: Self-Portrait: Pivotal Motion from Chin (medium), from the series Studies in Motion, 1974; gelatin silver print; 16 x 20 in.; BAMPFA, gift of Herbert and Paula Molner.