Wrackable as Arguments: Anne-Marie Turza’s “Fugue with Bedbug”

“[Anne-Marie] Turza shows dramatic flair for summoning our attention, that of a town crier or carnival barker who was handed a surprise announcement at the last possible minute, and now must sell its premise before a skeptical gathered audience with all the bravado she can muster.”

Surrealism is not difficult to understand. One of the reasons for that is inherent, the other historical. Inherent: We all have dreams and chances are they are absurd, disturbing, and disjointed. We accept this sleeping reality, as we are all post-Freudians, and he gave us a convenient set of explanations, boiling down to the fact that we are working out unconscious, unresolved issues as we sleep. Yet we tend to forget those dreams quickly (unless we tell them to our mate or our co-workers) and go about our day, generally accepting that even the strangest and most violent chains of imagery in our dormant minds have their own quasi-independent, private logic, one we could potentially puzzle over forever without necessarily getting to the bottom of them. Thus, we let them go and let odd new dreams take their place. Thus pass our lives.

The second reason, as said, is historical. Surrealism, which began as an outgrowth of Dadaist pranks, grew into a deeper, more earnest study of the dreamlike aspects of reality, and artists such as Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso created visual representations of liminal waking states of consciousness, often with obliquely suggestive erotic content. David Lynch’s quirky 1977 film Eraserhead stands as an apotheosis of surrealism in cinema, leaving us in the autoerotic, anxious murk of human intention, first announced in Luis Buñuel’s 1929 short film Un chien andalou, with its famous eyeball split by a razor blade. At the same time, beginning at least as early as 1928 with Felix the Cat, cartoons got into the game, channeling that original Dadaist party spirit, reminding people not to get too wrapped up in abstruse intellectualizing. If it’s not fun, don’t do it. If it is, run riot.

In this way, surrealism has, over the span of a century, become one of the most powerful and popular of all artistic movements, able to satisfy both lovers of esoteric high art and fanboys and fangirls of popular fare. It can be disturbing or squeaky clean. Everybody may not actually love Raymond (Queneau), but they all love surrealism in one shape or another—in poetry, prose, visual art, cinema. Warner Brothers would not have been the same studio without it, nor Disney, which has relied heavily on surrealist tropes and visual gags throughout its long existence. The Cartoon Network would not have lasted a year without rampant surrealist animation because children (and often the parents watching alongside them) quickly learn to embrace spirited illogic in an alternate world where nobody actually gets hurt.