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This chapter explores the role of chess in capturing the subversion of art making in Salvador Dalí’s works. It compares Dalí’s privilege of the hand to Duchamp’s dismissal of the hand and his emphasis on the intellectual. It examines how playing chess can represent a new way of thinking about art, the artist, and creative expression. It also states that Dalí’s comments on chess and his appropriation of Duchamp’s works mark his own figurations of the artist as multiple and his homage to the Duchampian redefinition of authorship as an appropriative gesture.

This chapter goes on to look at a rather different set of artistic works, namely the paintings of Salvador Dalí from the inter-war period, asking whether they enter into or stand outside the fetishistic processes they portray. The presentation of the surface of the painting as transparent, as a window through which one looks out on (or into) the landscape of the mind, distances the painting from its own status as a material object, complicating the way it participates in its own fetish dialectic. In order to sustain such an argument, it is essential to recognise surrealist works as always threatened by the fetishising forces they represent. Their status as critical responses to the capitalist commodity society is precarious, but at times also powerful. It is in their binding of sexual and commodity fetishism in a dialectial relation that they are able to illuminate both.

The continual play of presence and absence in surrealist objects is a function of repetition and representation, and it is in their relationship to mimesis that the multiple disavowals of those objects unfold. The starting point in this chapter is one particular, uniquely fascinating surrealist object, namely Salvador Dalí's 1933 Buste de femme rétrospectif, a work to which this chapter often returns in its analysis. The chapter proposes the fetish as a more useful critical alternative, tracing some of the many domains in which it can signify. While it would be wrong to suggest that any one theoretical notion can account for all the many, heterogeneous manifestations of surrealist activity, an extended analysis of Dalí's rétrospectif demonstrates how very helpful concepts of fetishism can be as ways of approaching surrealist uses of the object.

Chapter 1 is a study of Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and Surrealism. It discovers that Zukofsky based his poems ‘Mantis’ and ‘Mantis’: An Interpretation on an obscure text regarding the praying mantis written by the surrealist Robert Caillois. It discusses the surrealist interest in the figure of the praying mantis, and then argues that Lorine Niedecker’s triptych poems “CANVASS” and “Three Poems” cryptically refer to the surrealist praying mantis, and in particular to Salvador Dali’s writing and painting from the early 1930’s. Zukofsky’s objectivist and anti-allegorical poems may then be read as a response to Niedecker’s surrealist and allegorical pieces. The chapter demonstrates a generative tension in the poetics of 1930’s.

Chapter 3 demonstrates how surrealism applied its aesthetic sabotage tactics into the realm of its visual art production through an extended case study of artworks in different media from the 1930s by the Spanish surrealist Óscar Domínguez, all of which represent scenes of work or work-tool dysfunctionality and interference. The first section situates an analysis of Domínguez’s representations of work tools in the context of surrealism’s final overtures to the PCF and its participation in protests against fascism in 1934 – as well as the June Strikes that shook France in 1936, just as the Spanish Civil War was about to erupt. This contextual framing anchors an argument that Domínguez’s preoccupation with representing the subverted work tool during the 1930s can be seen as part of a surrealist critique of ideologies of productivism and authoritarianism through a celebration of worker and artist autonomy and self-management (autogestion) via artistic themes of autoeroticism and occasionally, autodestruction. The second section consists of an extended iconographic and contextual reading of Domínguez’s striking painting Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle (1934–35) in relationship to cultural histories of female sexuality. A lengthy formal analysis of this oil on canvas reveals the presence of a quasi-covert set of sexual references about women’s sewing-machine work, which are in turn corroborated by a substantial nineteenth-century historical discourse tied to the garment industry and domestic labour about the sewing machine as an involuntary autoerotic device for the secondary labour force of hyper-exploited female workers.

This chapter analyses the hybridization of the essay with visual genres such as illustration, photography, film, and video, an emergent tendency throughout the twentieth century that underscores the shared features of essayism and Surrealism. These include the use of a logic of digression and free association, a focus on the inner life of the self, the dismissal of formal strictures, the deployment of sensory perception, memory, intuition, and imagination towards expressive ends, and the reliance on images. Beginning with Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Montaigne’s Essays (1947), the chapter then turns to James Agee and Walker Evans’ collaborative photo essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Chris Marker’s essay-film Sans soleil (1982), and John Bresland’s video essay Mangoes (2010) in order to pinpoint the shared affinities between essayism and Surrealism.

The paradoxical surface, the glass/gloss of fetishistic seduction and denial, is at the heart of surrealism's power. In Salvador Dalí's painting, its pretence of transparency echoes the disavowal of violence at work in surrealist treatments of the body. In the objet surréaliste, it characterizes both the erotic allure of the commodity and the commodified bodily object, brought together in a parody of individual and collective desire. In the glass arcade, it embodies the very workings of commodity ideology. However, the surface also plays another role, one which has yet to be accounted for, and this chapter wants to conclude by delineating this final aspect of the surface as it relates to the political register of fetishism. On the one hand, it is an aspect that takes us back to the concept of the uncanny and issues of presence and absence, familiarity and estrangement.

This chapter addresses what happens when language is introduced into the picture-quite literally-in the form of the poème-objet, which combines text with three-dimensional collage. André Breton's own practice in the domain of object creation diverges from that of Salvador Dalí and others in one crucial respect: the incorporation of language into the surrealist object. The chapter considers how Breton's own involvement with visual forms of surrealist activity is motivated by particular aims, notably that of including language in the category of phenomena to be reappraised and inscribed in a dialectic of subjective and objective forces. For in seeking to prove the materialist credentials on which surrealism's political engagement relied, Breton created a class of poème-objet in which a power struggle takes place between word and image, between concealment and display, between fetishism and sublimation.

In Salvador Dali's joking aphorism, the virility of the concept of justice clashes with the grammatical gender of the word, ‘la justice’. Justice persists in the notion of a normal, adjusted, fitting, right division of sexual characters that the bearded lady contravenes. For, although she figures sexual ambiguity, in so doing she also keeps it at arm's length as freakish. This chapter explores the currency of the bearded lady in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French literature. In particular, it examines ways in which that currency is caught up in techniques of unexpected juxtaposition and displacement associated with avant-garde movements of the period, in particular Surrealism and Dada. The avant-garde is not entirely uninvolved with ladies with whiskers. The chapter considers the bearded lady, displacement and recuperation in Guillaume Apollinaire's play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917). It also comments on the feminine body in Apollinaire's first published book, L'Enchanteur pourrissant (1909), and Tristan Tzara's play Le Coeur à gaz, first shown in 1921.

Hinton used the hypercube, or tesseract, to explain four-dimensional geometry. Chapter 18 takes a detailed look at the hypercube and shows how its geometry can be understood through its cross-sections, its projections, and its nets. Albrecht Dürer introduced the idea of the net of a polyhedron in a treatise published in 1525. Just as a polyhedron can be unfolded into a two-dimensional net, so a hypercube can be unfolded into a three-dimensional figure. The painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) by Salvador Dali uses the net of a hypercube to depict the crucifixion. Robert Heinlein’s short story And He Built A Crooked House relates the tale of an architect who designs a house in the shape of a hypercube.

This chapter examines the images and prints of Abraham Lincoln in Europe. It explains that Lincoln suffered an image problem at the start of his presidential career and that his critics used rugged pictures of him abroad. It describes the images, engravings, and lithographs of Lincoln produced by various artists including D. J. Pound, J. T. Whatley, and Salvador Dali, and the cartoons that lampooned him in several magazines including Vanity Fair, London Fun, and Punch.

This chapter explores the question, posed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, ‘How can one be homesick for a home that one never had?’ Its focus is Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, the director’s most overt and sustained meditation on nostalgia, and the most wooing. The film concerns a twenty-first-century Hollywood screenwriter, Gil Pender, who stumbles effortlessly through the space-time continuum to find himself (in both senses) among Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation, a world he has always believed to be his spiritual home. Through Gil’s time-travelling odyssey, Allen probes the allure and the perils of nostalgia; he shows how nostalgia relies on impossibility or absence to feed it, to lend it piquancy and artistic efficacy. The chapter also examines the Lost Generation’s propulsive nostalgia which was spawned by a tremendous sense of rootlessness and flux, and why the Odyssey was a guiding text for expatriates like Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.

An understudied Hitchcock film, Spellbound (1945) is a crucial work. This chapter argues that the psychoanalyst heroine, long seen as frigid and repressed, is a positive Hitchcockian portrait of female sexuality. I reconsider Freud’s theories of female sexuality in terms of their influence on Hitchcock’s publically denied but important investments in the woman’s film genre. The film exemplifies the director’s characteristic decentering of the male protagonist’s rule, which allows the feminine/queer conflict to emerge. The heroine’s battle with a mentor-turned-villain, her superior at the psychiatric institution Green Manors, typifies the Hitchcockian pattern of love’s transformation into hate. Spellbound foregrounds “male suspenseful mystery,” presenting male beauty as a visual object that diegetically facilitates female sexual agency and opens up queer possibilities.