Introduction to Surrealism 2/8/16 Terms
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Introduction to Surrealism 2/8/16 Terms “equivocation”, a term coined by Dennis Hollier in the 1930s to describe a technique that takes the form of mimesis; it appropriates the enemy’s slogans and tactics by identifying with the aggressor. (p. 54) “epistemologically ambiguous” Heterology: exposing difference as the rupture of unity. post-structuralism / deconstruction: concerns the construction (or deconstruction) of the ways that texts make meaning. Predicated on reading culture as a system of signs. Bourdieu’s Food Space (updated) Manet’s “The Balcony” (1868) Art, and certainly documentary, is always an expression of its technological conditions. It’s both the call and the response. ● modern newspaper ~1850’s ● photography ~1840’s ● cinema 1890’s / 1920’s ● commercial radio 1920’s ● In the 1880’s Psychology invents the words “solipsism” and “telepathy”. ● In the 1920’s term Mass media is used for the first time, ○ Only after invention of term “mass media” does “communication” come to refer to face-to-face engagement as well, with little distinction between face-to-face and at a distance. early “attention” economy T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) Failure of communication rendered as sexual failure. —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. (lines 37-41) I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison. (lines 411 - 414) The Modern Project of Communication What is communication? Or more precisely, why is it a distinctly modern concern? 1. informing and binding a populace 2. purging semantic dissonance 3. reconciliation of “face-to-face” and mass comm / and solipsism/telepathy C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (1923) Dada, Surrealist Predecessor Dada (1916 - 1924) Russian: yes, yes. Romanian: no, no. French: hobbyhorse Dada artists felt the war called into question every aspect of a society capable of starting and then prolonging it – including its art. As the artist Hans Arp later wrote: “Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.” (Hans Arp) Characteristics: ● Centered in Zurich and New York City ● Defiantly Anti-Art (art for art’s sake / craft) ● Might be thought of as a reaction to a world gone mad ● characterized by chaos and fragmentation ● anti-humanist ● precursors in Duchamp’s Cubo-futurism, and elsewhere ... The Dada Readymade, Marcel Duchamp notes: Reaction to insistence on craft as virtue in and of itself. Intellect. Anti-aesthetic engagement with modern technology on man. An Intro to Surrealism If the waking mind reasoned such atrocities as warfare, colonialism, religious tyranny, and insensitive complacency, then it was surely the unconscious which held the keys to freeing minds from such horrible confinements. The human mind, preoccupied with experiential reality and the logic taught and reinforced by society, is ignorant of fundamental truths of human nature, and is persuaded to believe instead that oppressions such as war and religion are constructive and morally sound. Surrealists refused to believe such claims and recognized the powers of sexuality, death and the unconscious as universal human traits. Surrealism, defined by it’s founder. “the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality [sur = "on", "above" in French], if one may so speak." “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.” - Andre Breton (1924, Manifesto of Surrealism) If empirical thought is satisfied with “the given”, with “things as they are,” then the Surrealists believed that “things as they are” frequently turn out to be very different to what they seem. Dada vs. Surrealism Andre Breton: the failure of dada was that it became an art movement. It was recuperated by bourgeois culture. (It was too successful!) If Dada was a reaction to WW1, we might think of Surrealism as an acceptance of the forces at work beneath the veneer of civilization. If Dada was a critique of the project of communication, Surrealism was an expansion of it. Like Dada, Surrealism was dedicated to erasing distinctions between the claims of ‘art’ and those of ‘life’. Naming Freud as the guiding light for the Surrealist project, Breton talked not so much of the aesthetic producer (artist) but of the ‘human explorer’ carrying out ‘investigations’. Sigmund Freud wished to understand the human psyche better so as to reign it in and prevent atrocities such as WW1 from ever happening again. The Surrealists, however, thought that the subconscious should not be repressed and that events like WW1 were the logical culmination of such repression. Max Ernst (Dada and Surrealist Affiliation) Murdering Airplane, 1920 The Elephant Celebes, 1921 Joan Miro The Tilled Field, 1923-1924 - free association, primitivism, anti- nationalism, automatism Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926 - nocturnal longing, frustration, moon, free association, automatism. Yves Tanguy / Man Ray Promontory Palace (Palais promontoire) (1930) (see also Miro) Above: graphic match dissolve from Las Hurdes (1932) Right: (Surrealist) Benjamin Peret ‘Insulting a priest’ (1926). Surrealism and Catholicism: - Anti-moralist (on what basis can we say what is right and wrong? In what ways is moralism synonymous with repressed desire?) - Anti Status Quo The Catholic church was the center of social, and therefore political and financial life and reaffirms status quo. - All religion is primitive. One can’t make distinctions. Salvador Dali obsessional reinterpretation of external phenomena / paranoaic critical method. context of original image unknown. Salvador Dali Cape Creus, Spain. The Great Masturbator, 1929 (fantasy, castration/menstruation, anti-nationalism, free association, death and decay, paternalism) Salvador Dali The Lugubrious Game, 1929 (feces, desire, masturbation) Salvador Dali The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937).