SURREALISM
Surrealism is a
movement for the liberation of the mind that emphasizes the critical and
imaginative powers of the unconscious. Often misinterpreted as an artistic movement, it has transformed visual art, writing, film, music, and
political thought, not to mention everyday life. Surrealism was initially
started by André Breton and gained further momentum with the inclusion
of Salvador Dalí. Surrealism remains an active movement today.
The term surrealism was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe the Jean Cocteau/Erik Satie/Pablo Picasso/Léonide Massine collaboration Parade (1917) in
the program notes: "From this new alliance, for until now stage sets and
costumes on one side and choreography on the other had only a sham bond between
them, there has come about, in Parade, a kind of super-realism (sur-réalisme),
in which I see the starting point of a series of manifestations of this new
spirit (esprit nouveau)."
While related to Dada, from which many of its initial members came, surrealism is
significantly broader in scope. As Dada was a negative response to the First World War, surrealism possesses a more positive view that the world can be
changed and transformed into a fertile crescent of freedom, love, and poetry.
André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 and
the publication of the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste
("The Surrealist Revolution") marked the beginning of the movement as
a public agitation. In the manifesto of 1924 Breton defines surrealism as
"pure psychic automatism" with automatism being spontaneous creative
production without conscious moral or aesthetic self-censorship. By Breton's
admission, however, as well as by the subsequent development of the movement,
this was a definition capable of considerable expansion. Breton also wrote the
following dictionary
and encyclopedia
definitions:
Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote the first automatic book, Les Champs Magnetiques, in 1919.
Later, automatic drawing was developed by André Masson, and automatic drawing and painting, as well as other automatist methods, such as decalcomania, frottage, fumage, grattage and parsemage became significant parts of surrealist practice. (Automatism was later adapted to the
computer.) Many of the popular artists in Paris
throughout the 1920s and 1930s were
surrealists, including René Magritte, Joan Miró, Max Ernst,
Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy.
Games such as the exquisite corpse also assumed a great importance in surrealism. Although sometimes
considered exclusively French, surrealism was in fact international from the
beginning, with both the Belgian and Czech groups developing early; the Czech
group continues uninterrupted to this day. In fact, some of the most
significant surrealist theorists and the most radical of surrealist methods
have hailed from countries other than
In popular culture, particularly in the United States of America, surrealism is probably most often associated with the paintings of
Salvador Dalí. Dalí was active in surrealism from 1929 to 1936, and
gave the movement what he called the Paranoiac-critical method, which was well received at the time. From the late
1930s on most members of the movement have found Dalí's painting to have
had little significance for surrealism, and Dalí to have moved further
and further away from the movement. (However, there have been some, such
as André Thirion, who have taken a more measured view.)
The 1960s saw a
dramatic expansion of surrealism with the founding of The West Coast Surrealist Group as recognized by Andre Breton's personal assistant Jose Pierre and also
The Surrealist Movement in the
United States, and surrealist groups around the
world, including many in areas in which surrealism had not previously existed,
such as the Surrealist Group of Pakistan.
While surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has been said
to transcend them; surrealism has had an impact in many other fields. In this
sense, surrealism is not specifically the privilege of self-identified
"surrealists" or those sanctioned by Breton,
rather, it refers to a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate
the imagination. In addition to Surrealist ideas finding their genesis in the
ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud,
surrealism being inherently dynamic and claims to be dialectic in its thought,
surrealist groups have also drawn on sources as seemingly diverse as Bugs Bunny, comic strips, the
obscure poet Samuel Greenberg and the hobo writer and humourist T-Bone Slim. One might say that surrealist strands
may be found in movements such as Free Jazz (Don Cherry, Sun Ra,
etc.) and even in the daily lives of people in confrontation with limiting
social conditions. Thought of as the effort of humanity to liberate the
imagination as an act of insurrection against society, surrealism dates back
to, or finds precedents in, the alchemists, possibly Dante,
various heretical groups, Hieronymus Bosch, Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Comte de Lautreamont and Arthur Rimbaud. Some people believe that "Non-western" cultures also provide
a continued source of inspiration for surrealist activity because some may
strike up a better balance between instrumental reason and the imagination in
flight than Western culture.
Some artists,
such as H.R. Giger in Europe, who
won an Academy Award for his stage set, and who also designed the "creature," in
the movie Alien, have been popularly called "surrealists," though Giger is a visionary artist and does not claim to be surrealist. The Society for the Art of
Imagination has come in for
particularly bitter criticism from the surrealist movement (although this
criticism has been characterized by at least one anonymous individual as coming
from "the Marxists [sic] surrealist groups, who maintain small
contingents worldwide;" he has also pointed out what he considers the
hypocrisy of any surrealist criticism of the Society for the Art of Imagination
given that Kathleen Fox designed the cover of issue 4 of the bulletin of the
Groupe de Paris du Mouvement Surrealiste and also participated in the 2003
"Brave Destiny"http://www.wahcenter.org/exhibits/2003/surreal/index.html show at the Williamsburg Art & Historical
Center, which was criticised by a number of
surrealists in a tract entitled "Craven Destiny." However, though some presented "Brave Destiny" as the
largest-ever exhibit of surrealist artists, the show was officially billed as
exhibiting "Surrealism, Surreal/Conceptual,
Visionary, Fantastic, Symbolism, Magic Realism, the Vienna School, Neuve Invention, Outsider,
Naive, the Macabre, Grotesque and Singulier Art."
Although Breton initially responded rather negatively to the subject of
music with his essay "Silence is Golden," later surrealists have been
interested in, and found parallels to surrealism in, the improvisation of jazz (as
alluded to above), and the blues (surrealists such as Paul Garon have written articles and full-length books on the subject). Jazz and
blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest; for example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included such performances. (Surrealists have also analysed reggae and,
later, rap, and
some rock bands such as The Psychedelic Furs.) In addition to musicians who have been influenced by surrealism
(including some minor influence in rock -- the title of the 1967 psychedelic Jefferson Airplane album Surrealistic Pillow was obviously inspired by the movement, and some people claim that Frank Zappa's 1969 album
Uncle Meat was a "surrealist record" -- particularly hardcore),
such as the experimental group Nurse with Wound (whose album title "Chance meeting on a dissecting table of a
sewing machine and umbrella" is taken from a line in Lautreamont's
"Maldoror"), surrealist music has included such explorations as those
of Hal Rammel.
Surrealist films such
as Un chien andalou and L'Âge d'Or by Luis Buñuel have also been produced.
Surrealist and film theorist Robert Benayoun has written books on Tex Avery, Woody Allen, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers.
Some have described David Lynch as a surrealist filmmaker. He has never participated in the surrealist
movement or in any surrealist activity, but there are arguably some aspects of
many of his films that are of surrealist interest.
Others say that the film rock-opera "Pink Floyd The
Wall" contains surreal images; the wall, the teacher, the mother, the
wife, etc.
Some have found the television series The Prisoner to be of surrealist interest.
The Surrealist Movement in
the
For a summary of the
Surrealist Movement's perspectives today, see the Introduction
("Surrealism: The Chicago Idea") to The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts &
Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States,
1966-1976 (Black Swan Press, 1997). This collection of ninety-seven
documents from the first ten years of U.S. Surrealism,
is edited by Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon.