Idea - Surrealism

"Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members.

Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader Andre Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.

Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities of World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy and social theory."

www.wikipedia.org

"Influenced by psychological theories, Breton defined Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In the Second Manifesto Breton stated that the surrealists strive to attain a "mental vantage-point (point de l'esprit) from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, will no longer be perceived as contradictions.""

Petri Liukkonen and Ari Pesonen on Andre Breton

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/abreton.htm

From Dada to Surrealism

John G. Frey

http://www.jstor.org/stable/771260

“… Breton, the leading theorist of Surrealism, first opposed the real to the unreal and discovered the challenging, mysterious beauty of the dream world. From this time on…became preoccupied with the attempt to exploit the hidden forces of the subconscious, and the artist, absorbed in listening to the “inner voice,” was reduced to the status of a medium, “a modest registering machine, the silent receptacle of many echoes.””

“The development of Surrealism in the pictorial field is typical of the general trend of Surrealism from a passive attitude of enjoyment of dream-states and reveries to an active attitude, the typical case of which would the paranoiac attack on “reality.”  Surrealism in its later phases was conceived of as an active and irrational intervention into the sphere of “reality,” a development which manifested itself on the literary level as a transition form the trances of the “period of sleeping-fits” to Breton’s attempts at the simulation of mental diseases…”

Frey, John G. "From Dada to Surrealism." Panassus 8.7 (1936): 12-15. JSTOR. Web.

     24 Nov. 2010.

Dada, Surrealism, and the Academy of the Avant-Garde

Charles W. Millard

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3849231

“In the great deal that has recently been written about Dada and Surrealism, it has not been sufficiently noted that both were movements trading on previous styles, and both were attempts to modify modernism to make it “easier” and to reintroduce literary content into art.”

“Surrealism intellectualized Dada by using Freudian rather than artistic or mechanical references, and the search for subconscious meaning led to attempts at calling up specific emotions…and eventually to the exploration of dream imagery.”

“Every tendency of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been toward definition and atomization, toward the establishment of art as one thing and life as another, and toward the distinction of the arts one from another.  It its nostalgic effort to return to the past when boundaries were not so clear, Surrealism constantly sough to make art of life and to make of life an art...make objects of art out the facts of internal life, painting dreams, etc., and by introducing into life and art objects with no clear relationship to either.”

Millard, Charles W. "Dada, Surrealism, and the Academy of the Avant-Garde."

     The Hudson Review 22.1 (1969): 111-117. JSTOR. Web. 24 Nov. 2010.

I have been looking to surrealism for its dreamlike and non-sequitur imagery and ideas.  I feel as if surrealism is all about fooling the viewer, and presenting a world that is unlike anything they have ever seen, a world that is imagined and created by the artist.  The viewer is only given certain information, and it is completely up to them how they interpret the interaction between the limited information and themselves.  I want to attempt to make a connection like this.  Not necessarily through wild imagery that defies reality, but through limited, carefully placed information.

Salvador Dali

The Persistence of Memory

1931

Oil on Canvas

24 cm x 33 cm