This classic surrealist photobook pioneered the imagery of the domestic uncanny
First edited and published by Marcel Marien in 1968 in a limited edition of 230 copies, half a year after Paul Nougé’s death, The Subversion of Images is a miniature classic in both the photobook and surrealist canons. It collects Nougé’s notes and photographs from 1929–30 to form a guidebook to the surrealist image. Nougé here outlines his conception of the object and the surrealist approach to it, while also offering an accompaniment to the visual work of his colleague, René Magritte, whose paintings he sometimes titled. How might a tangle of string elicit terror? How might the suppression of an object move one to sentimentality? What is the effect of a pair of gloves on a loaf of sliced bread? Nougé’s accompanying photographs explore these notions, and feature a number of his Belgian surrealist colleagues. This translation is presented as a facsimile of the original edition, with an afterword by Xavier Canonne, director of the Musée de la Photographie. A biochemist by trade, Paul Nougé (1895–1967) was a leading light of Belgian surrealism and its primary theorist, as well as a decisive influence on such Lettrists and Situationists as Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, who would take inspiration from his conception of plagiarism for what would come to be termed “détournement.” Nougé steered the Brussels surrealist group toward a more rational approach to visual and verbal language that discarded the Parisian surrealists’ proclivity for irrationality and occultism.

The Subversion of Images: Notes Illustrated with Nineteen Photographs by the Author

Arts & Photography

Nougé, Paul

Photography & Video

Wakefield Press

The Belgian surrealist movement, like its contemporary French cousin, included both visual artists―René Magritte most famously―and writers, who were also its theorists. They shared with the Parisians a fierce commitment to personal, political and aesthetic liberty, and to humor, surprise and transgression as artistic strategies, but they parted company when it came to the unconscious and the occult. Ideas Have No Smell gathers exemplary works by three literary lights of Belgian surrealism: Transfigured Publicity, a visual text of early concrete poetry by poet and photographer Paul Nougé (1895–1967), the apostle of appropriation; the whimsical, hand-drawn artist's book Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse by Paul Colinet (1898–1957); and For Balthazar, a collection of aphorisms and observations by the ever skeptical author, lawyer and anarchist Louis Scutenaire (1905–87). In addition to the booklets presented in a facsimile-style translation by M. Kasper, this letterpressed slipcase includes an introduction by scholar Mary Ann Caws and a poster of an anonymously handwritten panneau of Nougé's visual poems, possibly coauthored with Magritte and previously reproduced only in Marcel Mariën's documentary history, L'Activité surréaliste en Belgique.
"The Belgian Surrealists were more radical, rational and imbued with the wit, folly and brevity of everyday life. This is a delightful sampler of three offbeat virtuosos." ―McKenzie Wark

Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets: Transfigured Publicity / Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse / For Balthazar (UGLY DUCKLING P)

Literature & Fiction

Colinet, Paul

Scutenaire, Louis

Literary

Ugly Duckling Presse

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