Melting clocks, bowler hats, peculiar
household objects, dream sequences, but
also uncanny incidents. Dorm room posters,
more dream sequences, and according to
Merriam-Webster, the year 2016. The word
'surrealism' has become a catch-all for
the bizarre, the irrational, the
hallucinatory; but when it emerged in
Europe during the tenuous turbulent
years following World War One and
leading up to World War Two, surrealism
positions itself not as an escape from
life but as a revolutionary force within
it: a movement aimed at the wholesale
liberation of the individual. Aesthetic
as well as political; literary as well as
visual. Originating in Paris but
ultimately international, freed from the
constraints of a singular style or
medium yet driven by a charismatic
leader. Surrealism was ambitious,
contradictory, and complex and it has a
history you might not guess from how the
word is used today. This is the case for surrealism.
The term 'surrealism' first appeared in the writings of French
poet Guillaume Apollinaire who used it in
1917 to describe Jean Cocteau's ballet
parade and his own play 'The Breasts of
Tiresias'. For Apollinaire, surrealism
meant the fruits of the human
imagination freed from the task of
imitating nature. Its roots lay in the
ethos of Romanticism, an eccentric 19th
century figures like the symbolist
fantasist Gustave Moreau, the self-taught
artist and customs agent Henri Rousseau,
the disquieting visionary Arnold Böcklin
and writers like Edgar Allan Poe.
Surrealism also emerged out of the
riotous spirit of Dada: a movement
originating in Zurich and Berlin which
sought to abandon artistic traditions and
disrupt the conventionality of modern
life: weaponising nonsense against the
institutions that had brought about the
catastrophe that was World War One. Yet,
the Surrealists were after not just
disrupting the world order through
nonsense, but reinventing it through
experimental tactics. The first of these
is automatism, or involuntary unwilled
action. In 1924, a young poet named Andre
Breton published the 'Surrealist
Manifesto', defining surrealism as"psychic
automatism in its pure state dictated by
thought, in the absence of any control
exercised by a reason, exempt from any
aesthetic or moral concern."
Breton had been experimenting with this
pure state since 1919 when he
co-authored a book length
stream-of-consciousness poem called the
'Magnetic Fields'. Breton's automatism is
based on the work of Sigmund Freud, who
theorized that human subjects are
divided between our conscious minds,
dominated by reason and restrained by
social manners; and the unconscious are
hidden reservoir of instincts, desires,
and unprocessed experiences that our
conscious mind works hard to repress. To
unleash the unconscious, surrealist did
things like transcribing dreams and
recording trance states under the
auspices of their Bureau of Surrealist
Research. The Surrealists insisted that
our repression was not just psychic but
social, and that liberating the
unconscious would have collective
politically revolutionary consequences.
'Transform the world!' said Marx, 'Change
life' said Rilke. 'For us, it's one in the
same,' Breton wrote. Surrealist magazines
were filled with dream accounts, stream
of consciousness writings, automatic
drawing exercises, even rapid-fire
questionnaires; all serving to unleash
the unconscious by circumventing the
control of the conscious mind. One of the
first two surrealist films made by Germaine
Dulac and Antonin Artaud explored the
consciousness of a clergyman afflicted
with impure thoughts it was advertised
as a dream on the screen and set up a
parallel between films and dreams, both
being spaces of fantasy and automatized
imagination.
The surrealist engaged in chance operations in pursuit of
automatism, often outsourcing creative
control to their materials. André Masson
poured sand over stains of glue to
produce turbulent landscapes or
mythological beasts. Man Ray illuminated
objects on light-sensitive paper to
create unpredictable compositions from
their shadows. Others employed frottage,
or rubbings, brûlant, or the burning of
photographic negatives, and decalcomania.
In each case surrendering control to the
process and aspiring to what Breton
called the marvelous or that part of the
self that lies beyond the reach of
reason. They also outsource creative
control to each other. Playing literary
and drawing games, such as the famous
'exquisite corpse' where the final poem or
image was the product of their
collective imagination. 'Chance' for the
surrealist also meant long
directionless walks recorded in the
novels 'Paris Peasant' and 'Nadja'. It included
chance encounters with so-called found
objects such as the ones Breton
described seeing in flea markets which
he claimed could have resolved both
psychological disturbances and artistic
blocks. The famous line of the poet
Comte De Lautréamont "as beautiful as
the chance encounter of a sewing machine
and an umbrella on an operating table"
became a kind of catchphrase for the
movement encapsulating its pursuit of
the unexpected.
Many of these found objects made their way into surrealist
work in the 1930s: arranged in
compositions that resembled reliquaries
or mysterious erotic contraptions,
seeking the marvellous through the
unexpected juxtaposition of objects
Meret Oppenheim, shown here posing for
Man Ray, created one of the most
enduringly evocative surrealist objects.
It was inspired by a conversation with
Picasso and Dora Maar at a cafe where
Picasso admired Oppenheim's fur bracelet
and remarked that one could cover
anything with fur. She replied, so the
story goes, "even this cup and saucer."
And then she brought this object into being.
Found objects could be images too. In the
collage books of the German artist Max
Ernst, images clipped from pamphlets
and ads populate his narratives with
chimera or swim up through layers of
gouache like steeping scraps of childhood
memories. Other works include forms of
ethnographic photographs such as the
'konkombwa' corn silo that Ernst
transformed into part elephant part war
machine. A photograph of an African
village turned on its side and
misinterpreted as an image of a Picasso
portrait catalyzed Salvador Dali's
so-called 'paranoiac critical method', a
spontaneous method of irrational
knowledge based on the critical and
systematic objectivity of the
associations and interpretations of
delirious phenomena, or in other words,
umm, make a science of your madness?
Like other avant-gardes before it,
surrealism drew inspiration from
non-western or so-called primitive
cultures which for them provided an
alternative set of aesthetic and social
values. Surrealist exhibitions often
incorporated objects from other cultures
alongside their own inventions. But for
the Surrealists these cultures were not
simply a timeless other they identified
their movement as anti-colonialist and
anti-imperialist. Mounting an
anti-colonial exhibition and publishing
pamphlets to protest the racist and
imperial presumptions of the 1931
colonial exhibition in Paris.
The surrealist interest in the uncanny is a
key ingredient in the persistence of and
why we just can't forget many of these
images. Freud explained it as something
that seems both familiar and strange at
the same time. For the surrealist, this
meant combining ordinary things in
extraordinary ways, but it also meant the
appearance of ghosts, masks, robots, and
dolls. These were doubles for the living,
human-like but not human. It also meant
this pipe which may look like a pipe but
it's also not a pipe. It's a double or a
depiction of a pipe. Photography, which
can itself be seen as a process of
doubling, was especially good at
generating the uncanny effect. It could
be manipulated with multiple exposures
and infinitely reproduced. Claude Cahun's
photos often engaged in uncanny doubling
while also playing on the performance
and fluidity of identity, often in
collaboration with her partner Marcel
Moore. This practice would prove handy
during the forthcoming war when they
disguise themselves to sneak into German
gatherings and distribute anti-Nazi propaganda.
As the threat of national socialism grew
and a second world war approached,
surrealist in Western Europe dispersed,
some going into hiding, others into exile.
Breton fled to New York where a
critical mass of exiled members staged,
in 1942, an exhibition they called 'First
Papers of Surrealism', referring to the
bureaucratic applications of the
emigrating artists. Marcel Duchamp strung
several hundred feet of twine through
the installation ensuring that both the
newly arrived artists and those who came
to see their work would be confronted by
their displaced status. Back in Europe,
Juan Miro began a series of paintings
on paper just as the war broke out and he
fled Paris. Constellations maps a complex
network of nodes that appear
simultaneously to coalesce into forms
and disperse into vectors, testifying to
a network that must sustain itself with
only traces of absent bodies. While the
core European surrealists disbanded, new
and related movements emerged abroad.
From Mexico City to the Caribbean to New
York, where a new generation of artists
would soon take up the charge of
liberating psychic energies. So the
movement largely concluded with World
War Two. Many of the tactics of the
surrealist bled out into wider culture
and began to be used toward commercial
ends, leaving behind much of the
revolutionary consciousness transforming
energy that birthed it. Surrealism left
in its wake a wide range of techniques
that artists still used today:
integrating found objects, experimenting
with automatism, or the disorienting
effects of collage, and summoning the
uncanny body to socially critical ends.
Ultimately, the Surrealists believe that
if we could find meanings that exist
beyond the rational mind, we might be
freed from the tyranny of the mundane, of
logic, and that we might discover truths
more real than reality. What's more,
surrealism gives us a way to think about
the connection between individual
creative freedom and collective
liberation. Even as it reminds us how
fragile that connection can be under the
rise of fascism, breaking down the
boundaries between dreams and waking
life, between cultures and between each
other, surrealism remains an example of
how reimagining ourselves can be the
definitive step toward changing our
world. In
retrospect it may seem naive, but then again,
in retrospect everyone looks naive. That
doesn't mean we stop trying.