ABSTRACT
An important moment in postcolonial aesthetics occurred in the 1930s, when a group of artists organized a counter-exhibition to the official Exposition Coloniale Internationale in 1931. These artists, Surrealists for the most part, had made common cause with Marxists, who “could regard each other as political allies” (Larsen, 1998) in their opposition to French imperialist policies. The gist of the Surrealists’ critique lay in the idea that vision was a force of domination in Western cultures, a problem that called for an aesthetic response. 1 As Adam Jolles (2006) remarks, this moment had important repercussion in contemporary critical discourse:
Preliminary evidence suggests that at the very least the Communist avant-garde perceived a way out of the artistic impasse caused by imperialism by making art that was meant to be anything but looked at. It would be work that would by necessity require an entirely different analytic and descriptive vocabulary – one that could bring to life the fetishistic, totemic, idolatrous, and/or ritualistic aspects of these objects (to name just a few of the obvious relevant categories). Perhaps the recent reemergence of this vocabulary in contemporary critical discourse points to the surrealists’ belated success in reorienting Western aesthetic practice. 2
