Spontaneous expression, purity of gesture and the quest for “energies, stifled for a long time”, are among the images that Françoise Sullivan calls upon in February 1948, during a conference where she delivers her conception of dance. “The dancer must release the energies of his body,” she says. Through the violence of the force at play, he can even reach trances. »
The words of the artist, then 24 years old, passed to posterity when the speech “La danse et l’espoir” became, months later, one of the texts of Global denial, the Automatiste manifesto written under the direction of Paul-Émile Borduas. For Abigail Susik, a specialist in surrealism, performance and dance, this text by Sullivan is more than historic: it is fundamental, as much as his choreographic work. Dance in the snow (1948) (illustrated in one), to understand what unites them, it and automatism, to surrealist thought.
“The automatist dance is capital. It shows how the body springs into the unconscious, as a non-rational part, explains the art historian attached to Willamette University in Oregon. [Pour Sullivan], Dance in the snow is absolutely free. It’s not even a discipline anymore, but a moment in the Nordic cold. It liberates the body and mind to a level that is difficult for most of us to achieve. »
A founding member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, Abigail Susik acted as an advisor for the huge exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders, put into circulation by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2021. A Quebecer among the 350 artists: Françoise Sullivan. Susik has great admiration for her – “she is the most beautiful and incredible woman, one of the most distinguished on the art planet”, she proclaims during an interview granted by videoconference.
Her admiration prompted her to prepare a communication on the centenary artist, which will be presented twice in November. First in Houston, on the 5e congress of the association she co-founded. Then in Montreal, at the Faculty of Law of McGill University, on an idea of Claude Gosselin, director of the Center international d’art contemporain de Montréal (CIAC) and member of the Tribute Committee to Françoise Sullivan.
The future lecturer likes to recall that Sullivan is one of the rare artists to have practiced automatist dance. She is situated somewhere after Hélène Vanel (1898-1989), in the company of Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) and before Alice Farley, who appeared in the 1970s.
war at work
According to the CIAC’s explanations, the building chosen for Abigail Susik’s conference is attached to the Ross House, “an emblematic place in the career” of the artist. She held her studio there between 1947 and 1950 and presented two choreographies there as part of the “first modern dance performance in Quebec, April 3, 1948”.
The Oregon scholar has set himself the goal of “really understanding what attracted the Automatists to the French Surrealists and establishing the differences” between the two groups. If Borduas and his disciples have shown themselves to be indebted for automatic writing to André Breton and company, Abigail Susik intends to insist on the notion of trance, at the heart of Sullivan’s reflections, and wishes to put it in parallel with the most political ideas of surreal. The automatist dance resonates with current events, judges the one who published in 2021 a book on the “war at work”, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work.
“Automatism is a form of resistance to productivity, to all those to-do lists. We are programmed to work, to earn money and to survive. When it translates into movements, as in Dance in the snow and in all of Françoise’s art, including her painting, the spirit frees itself, resists discipline. »
The Breton group, she recalls, did not advocate laziness, but fought alienation at work, in capitalism. It offers a relevant survival model as long as worker exploitation continues. “No one works only eight hours a day,” says Susik.
Sullivan’s penchant for abstraction, like all Quebec Automatists (one of the notable differences from the Surrealists), is a trait of this resistance to discipline, as he expresses non-predetermined action. Apart from Sullivan’s aesthetic approach, Abigail Susik sees in her longevity, and her insistence on going to work in her studio daily, another opposition to rational guidelines.
“His work comes from within, not from outside. Art is uncontrolled productivity, it is not a product of capitalism. I believe that creative work can save the world,” says the intellectual, who wanted to conclude the conversation with a clarification: “Françoise is more than surreal, she is unique. »