The third and last, 1932, issue of the magazine Surrealism Here and Now marks the end of some, primarily collective, activities of the Serbian Surrealists which were clearly ideologically oriented towards “social revolution.”152 The Surrealist movement, as known, came to be politicized already after Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929), with the about–turn in Serbian Surrealism being, albeit only partly, associable with Ristic’s and Popovic’s positions presented in the Outline for a Phenomenology of the Irrational (1931) and Ristic’s and Bor’s theses in the book Anti–zid (Anti–Wall) (1932). In fact, already the second issue of NDIO differed from the previous one in terms of concept, so that instead of photomontages, drawings and pictures, it carried photographs taken over from Russian revolutionary publications: Skidanje krstova sa Kremlja (Taking Down the Crosses from the Kremlin), and the next issue: Deca sama sa masinom (Children Alone with a Machine) and Masta u sluzbi propagande (Imagination in the Service of Propaganda), under the joint title Nadrealisticki elementi u modernom drustvenom zivotu (Surrealist Elements in Modern Social Life). It was at that time that NDIO, as a Surrealist publication, partly followed the concept of Stozer (The Pivot), a left–oriented revolutionary journal. Speaking of ideological parallelism, it is interesting to note that, in the same year (1932), The Pivot also borrowed photographs from the book La Russie au travail.153 In the wake of such major ideological realignment after the Congress in Kharkov, some of the representatives of Surrealism rallied, one last time, in 1936, around the editorial office of the journal Nasa stvarnost (Our Reality). Ideological misunderstandings from the past were also reflected on art, and Djilas, for instance, reproached Ristic for having written a laudatory essay on Picasso, having thus “undermined the new realism in painting.”154 In its twilight, Surrealism sought in vain to convince the untrusting left of its ideological correctness and social commitment. And how very far removed it itself was in that way from its initial positions is perhaps best illustrated by Aragon’s thesis from the 1920’s: “The thought of any human activity makes me laugh.”155

The art of Serbian Surrealism can be followed from 1926 to 1936, that is, from Eternity to Surrealism Here and Now, as the collective activity of different groups (1932), one gathered around Monny de Boully and the other around Marko Ristic, while the works of individual representatives, such as Ljubisa Jocic and, primarily, Bor’s photographs, extend this movement up to 1936. Naturally, some works bear somewhat later dates, as for example Marko Ristic’s 1939 Assemblage. Nevertheless, the main streams in the artistic practice of Serbian Surrealism end in 1936, which is the moment when the Surrealists, instead of publishing Surrealist editions went over to the magazine Our Reality. In a broader, international context, Surrealism then assumed the contours of a global phenomenon which left the old continent and moved to Japan, Mexico and America, and at the beginning of that year, 1936, major international Surrealist exhibitions were organized, the first one in London. However, Serbian Surrealism was not represented at the exhibition in London, nor was it represented at numerous other later joint exhibitions, because after 1936 the group of Serbian Surrealists existed no longer. Nor did Breton mention the existence of the thirteen Surrealists in his numerous lectures organized throughout the world, because ideology and politics had sown deep misunderstandings between Breton and Ristic, the two leading figures of French and Serbian Surrealism.156 It was only with the project, Surrealism, Social Art 1929–1950, that in 1969 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade comprehensively presented the art of Surrealism. After this auspicious beginning, there followed, from 1972 and the exhibition Der Surrealismus 1922–1942 of Patric Waldberg, held in Munich and then in Paris, the presentation of the art of Serbian Surrealism to the European cultural public. But, despite all that, it was still on the margins of the movement and almost totally unknown.157

The artistic activity of the Serbian Surrealists was of a multimedia nature, with their basic interest being innovation and experimentation, namely the new media, which at the time were primarily photography and film. Classical art disciplines such as oil on canvas and prints were not valued in the circle of the Surrealists, and the only trained painter among them, Radojica Zivanovic Noe, publicly renounced his practice of painter. Like the French Surrealist, Ribemont–Dessaignes, they believed that “visual pleasure” could be pursued without technical skills. In connection with the 1925 exhibition of Man Ray’s photograms, he emphasized that there were “still many painters, but obviously threatened with extinction... and they will soon be a rare species in the national park of art.”158 Vane Bor and Marko Ristic made their first photograms only a few years after Man Ray (1928), and Nikola Vuco’s photographs (1926–1930) observed the early revolutionary positions of Surrealism. These are the key works of Serbian Surrealism, which present, like Ribemont–Dessaignes, anti–painting and anti –photography positions, thereby, in the final analysis, negating Surrealist art itself. However, during the 20th century, the art of Surrealism experienced an about–turn, from the total rejection of “any aesthetic or moral preoccupation”, as written in the first Manifesto, to multidisciplinary experiments and exhibitions exploring the place of the Surrealist revolution in the context of the avant–garde and its influence on numerous phenomena, not only in later art movements, but also within the culture of the mass media and advertizing.

Although not even today can we state with certainty what the art of Surrealism is and what period the revolution took place in, its international language becomes all the more interesting as it is supplemented by local dialects. In that sense the works of Nikola Vuco, Marko Ristic, Vane Bor, Dusan Matic, Radojica Zivanovic Noe, Djordje Kostic, Oskar Davico and Aleksandar Vuco should be re–evaluated and viewed in the context of 20th century art. Their photographs, photograms, photocollages, collages, assemblages and objects negate the traditional categories of art and the concept of realism, while proposing new procedures and criteria of convulsive beauty which is arrived at by experiment rather than by conventional methods. In addition, it should be borne in mind that avant–garde art movements, until the emergence of Dadaism, and then also Surrealism, generally did not refer only to the Serbian but also to the Balkan cultural context. Such a milieu, thus, as Ristic observed, “was not convenient even as the object of passionate, consistent and extreme negation of the established norms and conventions of the bourgeois culture.”159 It is only with Dadaism, and much more so with Surrealism that avant–garde movements can be said to have unfolded practically simultaneously in European and Serbian art, despite the existence of vast social and cultural differences.

New visual structures, primarily the photographs and photograms of Nikola Vuco, Vane Bor and Marko Ristic, constitute the core of Surrealist art and define its place in the context of the history of Serbian art. We should emphasize that Serbian Surrealism treated the photograph in keeping with Breton’s views, meaning that precisely the photograph was privileged in interpreting the metamorphosis of the visible world: from the excessively realistic to the imaginary one. Being documentary, photography furnished Surrealism with the proof it needed on the reality of metaphysical phenomena, and thus secured for itself a privileged place in magazines and books.160 In that respect, the stances of the French and Serbian Surrealists fully coincided as well – the photograph of the girl with tattooage appeared in Testimonies in 1925, and Dedinac’s The Public Bird contained photomontages in 1926. And all later Surrealist editions were also “illustrated” by photographs, as were the magazines of the French Surrealists and Breton’s Nadja. In all these publications, the photograph was presented as an autonomous work of art, because, for the Surrealists, it was indeed a new and exceptionally valuable field of visual exploration.

The discovery of photography and then of film heralded the disappearance of traditional art, i.e., of just one guiding idea in art in favor of a pluralism of expressions and techniques. By its revolutionary program, Surrealism especially encouraged precisely that kind of research which used new media, because they were still not in the sphere of art at the time. In addition, during the first decades of the 20th century, neither film nor photography were made by professional artists, but by a variety of amateurs. Photomontage and collage, as we have seen on the examples of works by Dusan Matic, Aleksandar Vuco and Marko Ristic, combine elements of photography and film in a new visual structure, which according to Karel Teige “annuls professionalism in art. Like in photography, laymen and self–taught persons can find expression here. Photomontage and photography allow even ‘handless Raphaels’ to create with new materials< their techniques are so simple that, in principle, everyone can master them.”161 Naturally, this does not mean that professional artists, like Radojica Zivanovic Noe, were not interested in photomontage or collage, because they were techniques which, according to Marko Ristic, allowed a person to tell “his dream employing the material elements of someone else’s waking state.”162

Experimentation in the field of the visual arts or in the mass movement of amateur photographers was not a common practice outside Surrealism in the Serbian cultural milieu of the 1930’s. The preserved works actually constitute an “album of visual whims”163 revealing new, revolutionary potentials of art. A special discovery at this exhibition is the cycle of photograms by Marko Ristic (two of which were known of), as well as Vuco’s original photographs, not only negatives, so that after more than seventy years these works too can be included in the international Surrealist art collection on an equal footing. Although rather belated, all this information profoundly changes past views on the artistic activities of not only Marko Ristic but of the other signatories of the manifesto as well.

The period of collective activity of the group of Serbian Surrealists is delineated by photographs: Nikola Vuco’s The Arrested Flight of Surreality is at its beginning and on the cover page of the almanac The Impossible, while Pred jednim zidom (In Front of a Wall), a photograph by Raka Ruben, a photoreporter for Politika, was published in the last issue of NDIO, at its very end. The collective action, called a “simulation of the paranoiac delirium of interpretation” 164, unfolded simultaneously at two levels: one, the level of the real dilapidated wall, and the other, the documentary level of the photograph. Ristic says that Rastko Petrovic, Dusan Matic, Radojica Zivanovic Noe, Milan Dedinac and he were “like Leonardo’s disciples”, who were, with drawing or shading, to stress the “process of thought” imposed by the “spots, mold and cracks on the wall”.165 But, in the performance In Front of a Wall there is a basic difference distinguishing between the behavior of Leonardo’s disciples and the experience of the Surrealists.

Namely, Leonardo advises the painter to observe the clouds, mud, ashes on the hearth, spots on the walls, for such things ’move the mind to new discoveries’,166 but the group of Surrealists, half a millennium later, is no longer in a position to look at a wall, but at a photograph of it. Here is where the crucial difference lies: a Renaissance painter is expected to perceive the world directly, while a Surrealist artist observes a visually mediated world, i.e., one already interpreted by the media. The photograph assumed the role of mediator in the cracked visual subject–object communication. For the Surrealists it is a simulation of the wall, from which they embark on a new cycle of interpretation. And it is there, in front of a photograph of a wall, and not a real wall like at the time of the Renaissance, that the method of Surrealist manipulation of reality, the formula according to which anyone can be an artist, and Dali’s paranoiac delirium of associations are tested. For, “almost anyone can consciously bring to life that tangle of surfaces, lines and tones, discover images from his imagination in that tangle, impose a more or less (depending on his latent paranoiac ability) rich series, a transparent and deep deposit of simulacrum upon that surface.” Achieving this by simulation, i.e., the willful commencement of a “paranoiac and active thought process”, man accomplishes results just as true and incontrovertible as if his delirium had been entirely independent from his will, and can, thus, point out for everyone else the indubitable and concrete materializations of his idea ... We draw attention, once again, to the fact that, for us, this experiment ... absolutely has neither the character of a game nor the sense of a psychological test ... we do not doubt its scientific or moral, i.e., revolutionary value, just as one cannot doubt, not even at first glance, its value in the realm of direct poetic cognition.167 Although Surrealism proceeded from word and poetry, its pictures were much more seductive. This was a movement committed under its program to multimedia experiments, in which picture and word alike were employed to express thoughts and emotions, which blurred the borders among the different arts and prepared the eye of the modern viewer for a painless encounter with simultaneous mass media messages.