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tags:surrealismart
The Search for Freedom
link When Dada - Art and Anti-Art could no longer outrage because it became too academic and institutionalized, it lost all credibility as an avantgarde movement.
Spearheaded by Andre Breton a young doctor who had served in WWI. Breton began to see Bourgeois France, rather than Kaiser Wilhelm, as the real guilty party for having sent its sons to the slaughterhouse.
His writing praised everything primitive, celebrated black humor, brutal eroticism, and madness.
During the war Breton had been relegated to working in a psychiatric hospital where he interviewed deranged soldiers who produced bizarre images as if they had taken dictation from a genius who had possessed them while reason slept.
In the Surrealist Manifesto he defined it as, “psychic automatism in its pure state, which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or any other manner the functioning of thought. Dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Based on “the omnipotence of dreams.”
As soon as the first manifesto appeared, Breton was able to garner the support of a dozen fellow believers who were searching for a guiding spiritual light who could lead them in a revolt against institutions and philosophies that had tricked them into participating in a monstrous war. Most of these artists were ex-Dadaists who were contemptuous of logic and “good sense.” Now that the war was over, they were ready to abandon Dada’s nihilism and embraced the new freedom found in the unconscious nature of man
Breton conceived the sur-real condition as a moment of revelation in which are resolved the contradictions and oppositions of dreams and reality. The surreal moment, then, occurs when objects or ideas that do not ordinarily belong with one another coexist within the same context: “the resolution of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, in a kind of absolute reality, surreality, so to speak.
By the fall of 1924, the Surrealists became a functioning group. At first, it was dominated by literary men who practiced automatic writing, transcribed their dreams and took part in spiritualistic sessions at which the members would speak, write or draw while under hypnosis.
Judged on the basis of unconsciousness:
When Surrealism was a young artistic movement, the surrealistic artist was judged on the basis of how well he or she evoked unconscious material. To become more familiar with the unconscious, the surrealist dabbled in drugs and hypnosis. Early on in his career, Breton and Phillipe Soupault began experimenting with automatic writing. They would lock themselves up in a dark room, tried to simulate a semi-conscious, dreamlike state of mind, and wrote down whatever words, images and sentences emerged. What Breton found invaluable about this creative act was not the end product itself, but, rather, the procedure as a means of liberating one’s potential. And so, the essence of Surrealism became artlessness: the supremacy of method over product; the neglect, even the rejection of any aesthetic criteria; and the bringing of art into the sphere of everyday life. Inspired by automatic writing, by 1922 artists began to produce automatic drawings. Their drawings, however, make one wonder how automatic and unconscious they really were. These drawings suggest, rather, that unconscious doodlings were the starting point and inspiration for a more careful refinement and definition of certain figures and objects. Automatism, thus, became a means of inspiration and evocation, of calling or summoning forth images from our unconscious.