The wish for absolute freedom is one of the constants of intellectual life, and of all the art movements of our century, the one most concerned with this essential quest was Surrealism. The idea that collective sports and technology was about to usher in a Brave New World would have elicited hoots of derision from the pale, unathletic obsessives who made up the core of the Surrealist group. Far from believing in Utopian technology, most of them hardly knew how to change a light bulb! In the 1920's Andre Breton (poet) became the founder and leader of the Surrealist, issuing their first manifesto in 1924.
Breton did not fight in World War I. He worked as an intern at the Saint-Dizier psychiatric centre, treating shellshock victims -- an experience that deeply marked him. Helping patients to analyze their dreams "constituted," as he recalled much later, "almost all the groundwork of Surrealism... interpretation, yes, always, but above all liberation from constraints -- logic, morality and the rest -- with the aim of recovering their original powers of spirit." The only poetry worth having must be so obsessive that it world create a parallel world. Art and life could then both renew themselves by contacting forbidden areas of the mind -- the Unconscious. That, in turn, would refresh our sense of the world by disclosing a whole network of hidden relationships.
And the dream was the gateway. In dreams, the id spoke; the dreaming mind was unlegislted truth, and so was neurosis, the permanent involuntary form of dreams. In this, Breton and his circle were part of the great movement of though whose motor was the work of Sigmund Freud. Except, of course, Freud regarded neurosis as an illness, a condition to be cured, and Breton and his group wanted to preserve it, since they thought of madmen as oracles.
 The Harlequin's Carnival Joan Miro c.1924-25 |
And the other side of the surrealist coin was Chance. The chance incounter of a sewing machine on a disecting table... Breton thought that the perception of beauty was experience like fear or sexual desire... it could only be found, not duplicated. And it could be found any where, from picture postcards to a "sewing machine on a disecting table" at a Flea Market to a friends suicide... Art could release it mediumistically, rather than deliberately create it.
The artist was no longer a rational creator of images... He was now a medium through which flowed the universal truth of the unconcious. "Then what remains of Surrealism",to quote Robert Hughes again "Certainly, less than artists once hoped. Surrealism never realized its declared intentions... It left behind a testament of works of art, a perfume of revolt, but not a changed world... the world they opposed is still there" and so is Surrealism. The last major revival was the HippyDippy world of the 60's with its Hobbets and Magic Draggons and "Freedom Man, Freedom thats whats it all about.". And of course every special effects outfit, as well as artists, are constantly minning Surrealism for images.
Lynn University Art Appreciation
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