The Case for Surrealism | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios

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NARRATOR: Melting clocks, bowler hats, peculiar household

objects, dream sequences, but also uncanny incidents,

dorm room posters, more dream sequences,

and according to Merriam-Webster, the year 2016.

The word surrealism has become a catch-all

for the bizarre, the irrational, the hallucinatory.

But when it emerged in Europe during the tenuous, turbulent

years following World War I and leading up to World War II,

surrealism positioned itself not as an escape from life,

but as a revolutionary force within it,

a movement aimed at the wholesale liberation

of the individual.

Aesthetic as well as political, literary as well as visual,

originating in Paris but ultimately international,

freed from the constraints of a singular style or medium, yet

driven by a charismatic leader.

Surrealism was ambitious, contradictory, and complex,

and it has a history you might not

guess from how the word is used today.

This is the case for surrealism.

The term surrealism first appeared

in the writings of French poet Guillaume Apollinaire,

who used it in 1917 to describe Jean Cocteau's

ballet "Parade" and his own play,

"The Breasts of Tiresias."

For Apollinaire, surrealism meant the fruits

of the human imagination freed from the task of imitating

nature.

Its roots lay in the ethos of romanticism

and eccentric 19th century figures

like the symbolist fantasist Gustave Moreau,

the self-taught artist and customs agent Henri Rousseau,

the disquieting visionary Arnold Bocklin,

and writers like Edgar Allan Poe.

Surrealism also emerged out of the riotous spirit

of Dada, a movement originating in Zurich and Berlin,

which sought to upend artistic traditions

and disrupt the conventionality of modern life,

weaponizing nonsense against the institutions that had brought

about the catastrophe that was World War I.

Yet the surrealists were after not just disrupting the world

order through nonsense, but reinventing it

through experimental tactics.

The first of these is automatism,

or involuntary, unwilled action.

In 1924, a young poet named Andre Breton published

the "Surrealist Manifesto," defining surrealism as "Psychic

automatism in its pure state, dictated by thought,

in the absence of any control exercised by reason,

exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."

Breton had been experimenting with this pure state since 1919

when he coauthored a book-length stream of consciousness poem

called "The Magnetic Fields."

Breton's automatism is based on the work of Sigmund Freud, who

theorized that human subjects are

divided between our conscious minds, dominated by reason,

and restrained by social manners,

and the unconscious, our hidden reservoir

of instincts, desires, and unprocessed

experiences that our conscious mind works hard to repress.

To unleash the unconscious, surrealists

did things like transcribing dreams and recording

trance states under the auspices of their bureau

of surrealist research.

The surrealists insisted that our repression was not

just psychic, but social, and that liberating

the unconscious would have collective politically

revolutionary consequences.

"Transform the world," said Marx.

"Change life," said Rilke.

"For us, it's one in the same," Breton wrote.

Surrealist magazines were filled with dream accounts, stream

of consciousness writings, automatic drawing

exercises, even rapid-fire questionnaires, all serving

to unleash the unconscious by circumventing

the control of the conscious mind.

One of the first surrealist films

made by Germaine Dulac and Antonin Artaud,

explored the consciousness of a clergyman afflicted

with impure thoughts.

It was advertised as "a dream on the screen,"

and set up a parallel between films and dreams,

both being spaces of fantasy and automatized imagination.

The surrealists engaged in chance operations

in pursuit of automatism, often outsourcing creative control

to their materials.

Andre Masson poured sand over skeins of glue

to produce turbulent landscapes or mythological beasts.

Man Ray illuminated objects on light-sensitive paper

to create unpredictable compositions

from their shadows.

Others employed for frottage, or rubbings, brulage,

or the burning of photographic negatives, and decalcomania,

in each case surrendering control

to the process and aspiring to what Breton called

"the marvelous," or that part of the self that lies

beyond the reach of reason.

They also outsourced creative control to each other,

playing literary and drawing games,

such as the famous exquisite corpse, where

the final poem or image was the product

of their collective imagination.

Chance for the surrealists also meant long,

directionless walks recorded in the novels "Paris Peasant"

and "Nadja."

It included chance encounters with so-called

found objects, such as the ones Breton described

seeing in flea markets, which he claimed

could have resolved both psychological disturbances

and artistic blocks.

The famous line of the poet the Comte de Lautreamont

"as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing

machine and an umbrella on an operating table"

became a kind of catchphrase for the movement,

encapsulating its pursuit of the unexpected.

Many of these found objects made their way into surrealist work

in the 1930s, arranged in compositions that resembled

reliquaries or mysterious erotic contraptions,

seeking the marvelous through the unexpected juxtaposition

of objects.

Meret Oppenheim, shown here posing for Man Ray,

created one of the most enduringly evocative surrealist

objects.

It was inspired by a conversation with Picasso

and Dora Maar at a cafe, where Picasso admired Oppenheim's fur

bracelet and remarked that one could cover anything with fur.

She replied, so the story goes, "even this cup and saucer,"

and then she brought this object into being.

Found objects could be images too.

In the collage books of the German artist Max Ernst,

images clipped from pamphlets and ads

populate his narratives with chimera,

or swim up through layers of gouache

like steeping scraps of childhood memories.

Other works include forms of ethnographic photographs,

such as the Konkombwa corn silo that Ernst

transformed into part elephant, part war machine.

A photograph of an African village turned on its side

and misinterpreted as an image of a Picasso portrait

catalyzed Salvador Dali's so-called paranoiac critical

method, "A spontaneous method of irrational knowledge

based on the critical and systematic objectivity

of the associations and interpretations

of delirious phenomena."

Or in other words, um, make a science of your madness?

Like other avant gardes before it,

surrealism drew inspiration from non-Western, or so-called

primitive cultures, which for them provided

an alternative set of aesthetic and social values.

Surrealist exhibitions often incorporated objects

from other cultures alongside their own inventions.

But for the surrealists, these cultures

were not simply a timeless other.

They identified their movement as anti-colonialist

and anti-imperialist, mounting an anti-colonial exhibition

and publishing pamphlets to protest

the racist and imperial presumptions of the 1931

colonial exhibition in Paris.

The surrealists' interest in the uncanny

is a key ingredient in the persistence of

and why we just can't forget many of these images.

Freud explained it as something that

seems both familiar and strange at the same time.

For the surrealist, this meant combining ordinary things

in extraordinary ways, but it also

meant the appearance of ghosts, masks, robots, and dolls.

These were doubles for the living, human-like but not

human.

It also meant this pipe, which may look like a pipe,

but it's also not a pipe.

It's a double, or a depiction of a pipe.

Photography, which can itself be seen as a process of doubling,

was especially good at generating the uncanny effect.

It could be manipulated with multiple exposures

and infinitely reproduced.

Claude Calhoun's photos often engaged in uncanny doubling,

while also playing on the performance and fluidity

of identity, often in collaboration

with her partner, Marcel Moore.

This practice would prove handy during the forthcoming war

when they disguised themselves to sneak into German gatherings

and distribute anti-Nazi propaganda.

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As the threat of national socialism

grew and a second World War approached,

surrealists in Western Europe dispersed, some going

into hiding, others into exile.

Breton fled to New York, where a critical mass of exiled members

staged in 1942 an exhibition they called

"First Papers of Surrealism," referring

to the bureaucratic applications of the emigrating artist.

Marcel Duchamp strung several hundred feet of twine

through the installation, ensuring that both the newly

arrived artists and those who came to see their work

would be confronted by their displaced status.

Back in Europe, Joan Miro began a series of paintings on paper

just as the war broke out and he fled Paris.

"Constellations" maps a complex network

of nodes that appear simultaneously

to coalesce into forms and disperse into vectors,

testifying to a network that must sustain itself

with only traces of absent bodies.

While the core European surrealists disbanded,

new and related movements emerged abroad

from Mexico City to the Caribbean to New York,

where a new generation of artists

would soon take up the charge of liberating psychic energies.

Though the movement largely concluded with World War II,

many of the tactics of the surrealists

bled out into wider culture and began

to be used toward commercial ends,

leaving behind much of the revolutionary,

consciousness-transforming energy that birthed it.

Surrealism left in its wake a wide range of techniques

that artists still use today.

Integrating found objects, experimenting with automatism

or the disorienting effects of collage,

and summoning the uncanny body to socially critical ends.

Ultimately, the surrealists believed

that if we could find meanings that

exist beyond the rational mind, we

might be freed from the tyranny of the mundane, of logic,

and that we might discover truths more real than reality.

What's more is surrealism gives us

a way to think about the connection

between individual creative freedom

and collective liberation, even as it reminds us

how fragile that connection can be under the rise of fascism.

Breaking down the boundaries between dreams

and waking life, between cultures

and between each other, surrealism

remains an example of how reimagining ourselves

can be the definitive step toward changing our world.

In retrospect, it may seem naive, but then again,

in retrospect, everyone looks naive.

That doesn't mean we stop trying.