The meaning of surrealism
This most controversial movement of modern art, many times discredited, and misunderstood, is the
greatest attempt to change the world and to free the mind of man that occurred in this century. It is
the most idealistic attitude of the artist and proof of his absolute faith in mankind. Though this
tactics may be (seems to be) sometimes of a negative character, ultimately they are part of a
constructive program of discovery without limits.
Sunday morning, Magritte frying an egg on the flame of the unknown soldier.
It’s a sanitary movement too, the air had to be purified, the floor to be cleared. They had to break
the stuffy and well-guarded crust of conformity and hypocrisy covering a stinky concoction, and part
of their work is to stir it up, and to reveal what is underneath. They are indiscrete meddlers in the
public affairs and thus feared and hated by many. It is psychoanalysis on big scale, from a private
individual affair, they made it a public one. Some people adore to go on the couch, some hate it,
many wouldn’t think of it, and so is the reaction of the public as one person, we have the word
freedom in our mouth, but a prison in our heart. To break this stupid duality by all means, was and is
the aim of the surrealist revolution.
Irreverently the surrealist tries to dismantle, to confuse, and finally to get done with, a society, a
culture he considers doomed to decay, and disposition. A society so silly that two incredible cruel
World Wars were possible, and that keeps us living constantly on the verge of a third one.
[two notes in the margin of the first page:]
Freud = civilization and its discontents.
From the moment we say research without limitations, without boundaries, we are into trouble with
society which is based on agreements, laws, restrictions.
How can we describe the world they started to challenge. Around 1900, a world extremely rich on
one side, desperately poor at the other side, entirely out of balance. France and England at the
height of their immature colonial power, an arrogantly prosperous and still booming, immature
America with no interest in world affairs, a complete medieval Russia, and a lot of awkward and poor
countries, a world full of leisure, comfortably seated in an armchair of wealth, conformism,
academism, unconsciousness, and underneath a brooding world of discontents, anarchists, nihilist,
mystics, communists, a world living on a volcano, unaware of the great dramas to come. This world
still is the 20th like described by Scott Fitzgerald in “Tender is the night”, a world prepared and
undermined by thinkers who had great doubts as the fear and trembling – and despair - of a
Kierkegaard, the visionary attacks of a Nietzsche, the violent world of Dostoyevsky and so we grow to
World War I. Quite a shock, a bitter awakening. The Russian Revolution, The German Revolution, an
upside down world, starting to disintegrate. The young people of that moment felt like living in an
absurd madness world and all their supressed revolt bursted out. How did they proceed to manifest
their discontent, and their need to re-evaluate all values, the worn out values, to restore the
freshness, of surprise, of the new of the unknown, of their passion to discover, and to disclose the
storage room of their frustrated feelings. First of all by a deliberate negation of all the established
values, moral, political, aesthetical ones, all had to be defrocked first.
Before we go into this matter, let’s first look at a few signs of premonition, tinted by an
overwhelming and depressing feeling of melancholy with a foreboding atmosphere telling us that
there is something cooking.
[added ]A world free of red tape-masking and scotch tape – no passports – no identification cards –
no taxes.
de Chirico - Melancholy and mystery of a street, 1911 [in margin: slide I]
An immense feeling of loneliness. The haunting presence of a shadow. The nearly absurd
unconsciousness of the playful child with a hoop.
“I believe that we must never forget that a picture must always be the reflection of a profound
sensation and that profound means strange, and strange means uncommon or all together
unknown.”
“There are many more enigmas in the shadow of a man who walks in the sun than in all the religions
of the past, present and future.”
“Who can deny the troubling connection that exists between perspective and metaphysics?”
“To be really immortal a work of art must go completely beyond the limits of the human: good sense
and logic will be missing from it.”
“To understand the inner recesses of his heart: that corner which is the most profound, the most
mysterious, and finally the truest, to look only into this corner, and to see only through this corner, to
have the courage to give up all the rest, there is the artist of the future.”
It is clear from there by his own statements what this man is longing for – a descent at the bottom
and an unveiling of the unconscious – till than regarded as the world of evil, now as a source of new
and fresh inspiration.
The shadow in this painting is not of a man, but of a statue of a man, thus already a realistically
unreal man, where a mechanical and artificial process has interfered.
To undo man from his reality and differentiation - unique being – no animal – no angel – we reduce
him to an object, in marble, wood or some mechanical construction. He becomes a mannequin or a
dummy. You may have all experienced how incredibly alive a dummy can seem to be.
Duchamp - Nude descending a stair case, 1912 [in margin: slide 2 Duchamp]
Still with roots in cubism, we nevertheless become to deal with a new mystery.
The mechanical human being. Clic! Clic! Clic?
Broken, folded, disjointed, as a little clock but functioning.
[in margin: slide 3: Mona Lisa] Duchamp will go further and will do this to the “Mona Lisa”. This is
already one step more in the destructing of so called sacred values. The Mona Lisa was till then
regarded as the supreme masterpiece, the model of female beauty and dignity. An unchallenged
masterpiece. With the weapon of humour and irrelevance Duchamp with one little common trick
made the Mona Lisa ridiculous. The far reaching consequences of such a gesture can hardly be
measured.
If we recall Freud timid attempt in his book “A childhood memory of Da Vinci” in which with care and
circumspection Freud risks hesitantly to suggest that Da Vinci might have had homosexual
tendencies, we measure the impact, and forms the reputation of Da Vinci’s genius must have had, so
dominant to even scare the brilliant genial mind of the rational scientist Freud, as Freud was
ashamed to be so indecent. Our civilization had made of its heroes sugar puppets, pure and
innocent, and had blacked out at least half of their personality. Duchamps’ L.H.O.O.Q. ridiculed the
Mona Lisa but revalidated the man Da Vinci, by restoring him to a whole human being, with so much
good, so much evil.
Our civilization had done the same to its religion and the famous Sacré Coeur.”Holy Heart” in
Montmarte, Paris, was commonly named among the people the ‘Sucre Coeur’, the ‘Sugar Heart’.
Albrecht Dürer – Melancholia [in margin: slide 4 Durer]
We are confronted by a mood which is overcome by the unsolvable problems of a too crowded
world. A depression and despair provoked by the weight of too many mysteries and secrets. And
the question comes up how are we going to survive.
[in margin: When common sense seems unavailing in the face of overwhelming odds, in such
situations nonsense may appear to have super rational values, nonsense becomes peculiarly
meaningful.
[in margin: slide 5: de Chirico]
De Chirico poses the same problem with enigmatic signs in the “Evil genius of a King”.
Luna Park. Amusement park. Lunatic park.
[in margin: slide 6 slide 7 slide 8 slide 9]
Hector and Andromache, 1917
de Chirico: Nostalgia of the infinite, 1913-14
Disquieting Muses, 1917
Fatal light, 1915
We could say that a painter when he abandons the domain of the visionary that he abandons
painting. We are looking for the painter who has actually seen something, which means he has seen
beyond the surface, he has looked under the skin.
To come back to the question how do we do that, what are our techniques to reach that point of
revelation and I quote from the first surrealist manifesto by André Breton in 1924:
Definition of Surrealism:
“Pure psychic automation by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing or by other
means, the real process of thought of the functioning of our mind. It is thoughts dictation, all
exercise of reason and every aesthetic or moral preoccupation being absent.”
This is one first point we want to consider, automatism. We know how it works in writing – a blank
sheet, and you write down without control the words, phrases or part of it as your mind functions, as
it comes along. It is our only way of discovering how our mind actual functions, and it is the same
process as the patient who talks himself empty without withholding to the psychiatrist.
[in margin: collages. cubist paint papers – no paste real paper]
Don’t forget though, that if the process is the same, we have to deal in the psychiatric case with a
sick person, living in confusion and needing help and that the other is perfectly sane, and uses this
method to increase his creative powers and possibilities.
What could we call the equivalent of the method of automatic writing in the visual arts. Here we find
the collages, frottage’s etc.
[in margin: Da Vinci: Moistered walls]
When the cubist between 1910 and 1912 started to use collages, the painter wants to paint wood, by
the technique of oil paint he has to imitate wood, no, he will take now a paper imitation wood, and
glue it on his canvas. He will not interfere as a skilled imitator, but any material may become useful,
in his unbridled urge to create, to realize his vision. This was a first step and is the original sense of
collage. We have de-gradated this method for purposes of pure esthetical meaning. The surprises
discovered is using any trash or material, the free association the mind can make opened here again
an unknown and unexpected field.
Picasso: thumb tack, matches, butterfly, a leaf, string, cloth glued and plastered together [in margin:
slide 10 Picasso]
The surprises that came up during these experiments were a delight for the discoverers and one
hazard, or combination by chance led to the next one.
As in science the calculus of probability became more and more important, we find in the artistic
creation that the laws of chance, contradiction or the game of chance become predominant and so
we turn into the hallucinating images of visions as the one the surrealist took up as their leitmotiv,
the famous phrases by Isidore Ducasse:
“The incongruity of this encounter may shock, may evoke many side-line symbols, and
associations, and they are obviously of sexual nature.”
Max Ernst: Fatagaga, 1920 [in margin: slide 11]
What happens here is the so-called “depaysagement” – as displaced persons – of objects, translated
as displaced objects, but literally objects put into a unfamiliar landscape in a non-conform, unfitting
surrounding, out of their context.
This has a liberating spell on these objects. A chair: we are used to see four legs on the ground and
something to sit on, placed its four legs against the ceiling is no chair anymore, it becomes a
completely new and haunting object. It acquires a new personality. A tee cup and spoon, limed with
fur becomes an incredible revolting object; imagine drinking out of that.
The nearly liquid watches of Dali are as anguishing as the muses of de Chirico and making us aware of
unexpected possibilities
Dali: The persistence of Memory [in margin: slide 12 Dali]
Dali will say: “This complete surrender to the function of our mind without any control was the most
sensational attempt of all times to attain the freedom of mind.”
And Dali will go one step further and - as the fanatic he is - he will organize and systematize it all to
the so called “paranoiac analytical activity”, which is a spontaneous outburst of irrational knowledge
based on the interpretative analytical association of delirious phenomenon.
Which in its turn will allow us, according to Dali, “to systematize confusion and to contribute to the
complete discredit of the world of reality”. And here we come on another weapon of the surrealist,
to create consciously deliberately confusion.
Dali: The Invention of Monsters [in margin: slide 13 Dali]
Ernst: Portrait of Peggy [in margin: Side 14 Ernst]
Don’t think there are only monsters and phantoms, nightmare’s and disasters in the revelations of
this unconscious world, our nightmare world. There is a vast room for force, and comics, and many
of our daily comics in the papers are pretty surrealistic. From the moment we admit all sides of the
inner life of man to come to the surface, there is no end to our richness of motions and sensations.
We find jokes in words. Duchamp was champion in this kind.
“ma robe est noire dit Sarah Bernhardt»
“My niece is cold, because my knees are cold».
“We particularly recommend one of our lazy items in hardware, a faucet which stops dripping when
you don’t listen to it.”
We may face the most hilarious, human, and at the same time tragic situations. I read you a clipping
for the Boston Globe – a fait divers.
“Man’s Credit O.K., but, O, The References!
New York, Feb. 25 (UPI) – Michaël (Lover Boy) Canella was separated today from his three blond
wives. The wives – Lillian, 29; Ethel, 27, and Patricia, 23 – appeared sad yesterday as Cannella was
sentenced to from 21/2 to 5 years in Sing Sing for bigamy. Each said she would be happy to marry
Cannella again if he could restrain himself to one wife at a time. Cannella, a plumber, had managed
to commute from one wife to another without arousing suspiction until last August. His marital world
collapsed when he tried to buy a ring for his third wife by giving the names of the first two as credit
references.”
Don’t tell me do not live in a surrealist world.
We can come into the most joyful and funny and happy world of Miro.
Miro: Dutch Interior [in margin: slide 15]
Miro: Beautiful Bird explains Unknown [in margin: slide 16]
Miro: Dog Barking at the Moon [in margin: slide 17]
The two systems of passive confusion by the method of automatism, and the active organized
confusion by the method of the introduction of paranoiac activity and phenomenon into the art
world and therefor into daily life, are the great challenges surrealism has brought to our
consciousness of well behaving citizens.
No wonder that any well-organized society declares them mad – and improper – the absolute
freedom of the mind can live only in extremes.