A Current Note on an Old Letter about the Future: Thom Burns on Vincent Bounoure
Recently, Thom Burns sent me a note of explanation and response to a letter he received from Vincent Bounoure, a founder of the groupe de Paris du mouvement surréaliste in 1970 and author of many works, including Le surréalisme et les arts sauvages, La peinture américaine, and Vision d’océanie. The letter appears in the Anon Editions collection Invisible Heads, which may be downloaded for free for a limited time at Lulu.com.
There are certainly pages of Invisible Heads that could use extra commentary. This concerns just one. In volume two in the chapter on Arizona on page 494 there is a letter in translation from Vincent Bounoure addressed to me dated December 16, 1985. In it is expressed something about the subject bravely termed “civilizations without writing,” by which he means, in particular, Native Americans and the people of Oceania whose artistry once profoundly interested surrealists, although he is speaking much more broadly about tribal peoples throughout the world. You, dear reader, know without much fuss precisely who and what the author of Surrealism and the Savage Heart means by the term.
Although the letter is addressed to me while I yet lived in San Francisco, it finds its place in the Arizona chapter of Invisible Heads because it marks, at the time anyway, my last formal contact with the surrealist movement and coincides with the beginning of my journey to Arizona, which will take another five years to complete. He is responding to a letter I wrote to him after I learned of the death of his wife Micheline. I do not have a copy of my letter but I remember that in it I express condolences and remind him of the life-affirming ceremonials of the Hopi people to which my friends and I are already witness, and through which new friendships and collaborations with Hopi individuals are forming. I offer assistance as liaison or guide should he choose to get away from Paris—it might do him some good after all even if it means stepping on US soil to get there.
It is interesting that he can find no words to respond to this invitation but chooses instead to respond to my admonishment of surrealists for essentially ignoring the vast ceremonial habitat of “primitive art” in favor of its narrow plastic power as a source of “convulsive beauty,” which in my opinion makes it generally a flat aesthetic concern like any other. To this I use, like anyone would, the example of Jean Benoit’s grand ceremonial as a touchstone leading in the right direction out of the gallery and into live realms. To this also, for reasons I can only unfairly speculate, he chooses to refrain from comment.
I met Bounoure in 1976 and experienced the weekly meetings of his Bulletin de liaison surréaliste (BLS). In writing to him nine years later I sought and achieved clarity about a certain insufficiency in surrealist material culture; it is incapable of conveying the common thread it has often explicitly presumed to share with its counterpart in “civilizations without writing.” Beyond that are the shadows because he indeed expressed the point quite unequivocally: There can be no hope of achieving anything close to the deeper meanings radiating from Oceanic or Pre-Columbian works unless life as a whole is changed. Only then, in his opinion, will we again communicate with that ancient lucidity restored. My opinion will be different; achieving the lucidities of meaningful communication with artifacts and particular attire, rhythms and voice, dance, time, place, and good cause, is something clearly available everywhere as long as those rare birds who pick up the cause will be up to the task. This is the last contact I have with Vincent Bounoure. Then the deserts are soon in bloom and in 1985 the Surrealist Movement is getting so damn old.
For more on Bounoure and the Paris group of the surrealist movement, see the review of Insoumission Poétique.
