Re-membering surrealism in Charles Henri Ford’s Poem Posters (1964–65)

This essay explores Charles Henri Ford’s Poem Posters series of 1964–65 and the ‘Having Wonderful Time Wish You Were Here’: Postcards to Charles Henri Ford exhibition at the Iolas Gallery (New York, 1976). Ford’s editorship of View magazine (1940–47) is well known in scholarship on surrealism’s reception in America, but less frequently addressed are the ways in which his later artistic and curatorial practice self-consciously continued the publication’s mission of promoting a queer and partisan identity for the movement. Ford does more than simply enable surrealism to resonate further than its epicentre. He intervenes at the level of historiography, an action, this essay argues, which is implicated in his efforts to rethink the movement’s sexual politics. Drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s scholarship on queer temporalities, this essay considers how Ford’s anachronistic recourse to surrealism in the 1940s and again in the 1960s, long after the movement was said to have passed its expiry date, aligns disruption of linear narratives of avant-gardism with a recalculation of its customary heteronormativity.