Surrealism has always appealed to me. As far back as I can remember, I connected with fairy tales, which in my opinion is a close cousin to surrealism.
For Surrealism is merely the releasing of the creative potential of the unconscious mind. It is that ability to see things past the matrix of learned perception.
Learned Perception is the combination of the concepts we learned through education, religion and politico/social input.
Surrealism as Visual Art
The surrealistic art movement surfaced at the beginning of the 20th Century, at a time when the process of innovation was on the rise throughout The United States and Europe.
The Armory Show of 1913 housed an international art show at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York that “shocked the country into changing our perception of art and beauty.”[i] Among the many great artists who had exhibits at The Amory Show were the European artists, Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh.
The Armory had also showcased Dada pioneer, Marcel Duchamp, a French artist whose work Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, prompted mixed reviews. The Nude was meant to provoke emotional and social movement by expanding our perception through its depiction of the “human body in motion.”[ii] This exhibition of the possibilities of flow in creative thinking gave us a much-needed break from the traditional representations which art critics were accustomed to displaying.
This art allowed the collective consciousness to break out of the mold of the Enlightenment movement that embraced reasoning and the intellect and to move towards the visionary aspects of creative thinking. It thrust us into an understanding of the possibilities of expressing our dream state or symbolic ideas by using visual distortion, thus bending the impossible into the possible. In short, it was a movement that urged the critical thinking and reasoning aspect of humankind’s minds towards an expression of art that embraced vision.
The surrealistic movement was akin to the Dadist in that it shared their sense of disillusionment. However, rather than leaning towards the absurd as did the Dadaist, the surrealistic movement sought to traverse the gap between reality and the subconscious. When one thinks of surrealism, it most always goes toward Salvador Dali, an artist that could not only bridge the gap between reality and the subconscious, but one who could open the vent of artistic expression across the board. For instance, his painting The Sacrament of the Last Supper moves from that of realism into the surrealistic with a mere sweep of the eyes.
Another great surrealistic artist, one that I actually just got introduced to late in the game, is Remedios Varo. Varo was a Spanish/Mexican painter and sculpture, who shed her mother’s catholic leanings and clung to her father’s universalist belief system. While growing up, she would eagerly escape into the works of Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe and Alexander Dumas. Varo also indulged herself in the studies of mysticism which included alchemy and magic.
Thus, Surrealism as a bridge to the subconscious, allows us to think outside the box. To understand that the world we generally perceive as reality is not altogether valid. Rather, surrealism allows the mind to soar to places previously unseen and to know that there is more to life than a mundane existence.
~Free your mind~
[i] https://www.npr.org/2013/02/17/172002686/armory-show-that-shocked-america-in-1913-celebrates-100 [ii] https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/51449
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