Freuds Arguments as a Basis for Surrealism - Research Paper Example

Freud’s Arguments as a Basis for Surrealism Surrealism is one of the most famous artistic movements of the 20th century. The roots of the art form now known as surrealism had its start in the rapidly changing world of the 19th century. With the rise of the metropolis as industry and urbanization took control, subjective society as known in the rural districts increasingly became supplanted by the objective society of the cities. Through the use of factories and other time-ordered activities, the physical experience of the individual changed to be one of outer, rather than inner, organization. Because of this enforced rhythm to life in the city, explorations of art, literature and science into this mechanized realm produced the idea of the phantasmagorical. Phantasmagorical is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions. J.C. Powys defines it as the “incongruous imagery in surreal art and literature” (Phantasmagorical, 2005). Beginning mostly in Europe, with some Americans participating, Surrealism featured a number of rebellious and strange artists. They used disjunctive and bizarre comparisons and contexts to try to break through to a cultural subconscious. In the course of making their art, they wanted to expose the hypocrisy that lay at the heart of what they considered to be a decadent, bourgeois world that only they truly understood. But what inspired these artists to follow the surrealist path? The answer must largely be the work of Sigmund Freud, particularly in his theory of consciousness and the subconscious mind. The ideas of Sigmund Freud, which are now relatively widely known, combined with the spiritual goals of Expressionism to give rise to Surrealism and its expression of the inner dream-state of the artist. Freud’s ideas include the subdivisions of the human mind into the subconscious and the conscious (Downs 2004). Within this distinction, Freud says the true, natural inner nature of the man can only be found within the much larger and mostly secret labyrinth of the subconscious mind. While this subconscious mind cannot be directly accessed by the conscious mind, hints and suggestions from it can be received through dream imagery. Freud wrote, “Some processes become conscious easily; they may then cease to be conscious, but can become conscious once more without any trouble: as people say, they can be reproduced or remembered. This reminds us that consciousness is in general a very highly fugitive condition. What is conscious is conscious only for a moment. If our perceptions do not confirm this, the contradiction is merely an apparent one” (Freud, 2007). This distinction is an important one. It is hard to grasp hold of the unconscious. It has a mind of its own (pardon the pun). Giving voice to it, when it is most nonsensical or most sensible, in all its strange forms, is what the surrealists were good at doing. All of this jives with what Breton called the “unsparing quality” of the imagination. In the imagination or unconscious many things can bubble up, often without rhyme or reason. Breton studied the communication of dreams and what meaning they might represent. He had noticed that dreams often lacked any element of common sense and normally defied logical reason, but felt that this made them even more important than logical thought as a key to the inner mind. “Breton was convinced that this was, in effect, throwing away something of inestimable value, and in the Manifesto he described a method of writing that makes the dream accessible to our waking consciousness. This, in effect, is a kind of automatic writing – writing that as far as possible is uncontrolled by our critical faculties” (Danto, 2002). Breton defined the movement that he envisioned to bring the dream world to the core of artistic thought in his writings. In his First Manifesto, he defines surrealism to be “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations” (Breton, 1924). With this definition, time became an important element in the expression of surrealist thought. If the process of creation couldn’t be achieved without the undue intervention of the thoughtful or waking mind, then it couldn’t be considered Surrealist. While World War One taught the Surrealists about nihilism—the massive meaningless destruction wrought on the battlefield and the premature deaths of many of their colleagues—they also put into action ideas found in the work of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud which were rapidly gaining in popularity in post-war Europe. Many of Freud’s ideas centre on the concept that there are underlying formulas and motivations beneath the superficial social lives we lead. Within his psychoanalytic theory, Freud outlines three major components of an individual’s psyche – the id, the ego and the superego. Within this structure, Freud defines the id as completely unconscious, consisting mainly of instincts and impulses. The ego is that conscious part of the psyche that develops as one experiences the rules and requirements of reality and the superego is that part that deals with morality and ethics. Within this structure, the id and the superego can both be considered to be largely a part of the subconscious mind. It is the conflict between doing what we want to do, doing what we need to do and doing what we feel is right and moral that leads to the development of defense mechanisms which lead to the need for us to work out these conflicts sometimes in unusual ways (Pagewise, 2002). “Defense mechanisms [are] the psychoanalytic term for unconscious methods the ego uses to distort reality, thereby protecting it from anxiety. In Freud’s view, the conflicting demands of the personality structures produce anxiety” (Pagewise, 2002). He believed and wrote about another version of reality created by these defense mechanisms of which we have only a limited awareness and which reveals itself to us in symbols and patterns of speech. These concepts were immediately adopted by the Dadaists and lent an uncanny psychological depth to much of their early work. It also gave them a credible theory to back some of their stranger experiments. Some of the Freudian ideas taken up by the Dadaists had been taken up earlier and presaged by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico who began to exhibit his deeply enigmatic paintings in 1913, around the same time as the less obviously Freudian Duchamp. Indeed many of De Chirico’s paintings were called the Enigma of X—the Enigma of the Oracle, the Enigma of Arrival, etc—titles that would later be imitated by the powerfully proficient surrealist Salvador Dali. Many of De Chirico’s early, influential paintings featured a nameless Mediterranean town inspired in part by Turin, in part by the Greek town of Volos, where nameless travelers pass in a dreamlike setting. As the critic Robert Hughes writes, “For the past [ninety] years, de Chiricos city has been one of the capitals of the modernist imagination. It is a fantasy town, a state of mind, signifying alienation, dreaming and loss. Its elements are so well known by now that they fall into place as soon as they are named, like jigsaw pieces worn by being assembled over and over again: the arcades, the tower, the piazza, the shadows, the statue, the train, the mannequin” (Hughes, 1992). It was the poet Guillaume Apollinaire who introduced his work to other nascent Dadaists and Surrealists. He himself was rewarded with a portrait by De Chirico. But like Duchamp, De Chirico only was influential in the early years, he was later phased out of the canon as Surrealism became more political. Surrealism was a wildly various movement, but it was unified by a number of key themes. Among them were the ideas that the world we see around us is only a superficial construction beneath which lurks a number of conflicting and even destructive emotional responses. Traditional forms of representations can bring these subterranean feelings—the Freudian subconscious—to the surface in the form of symbols and symbolic connections and so Surrealists took a different approach to classicists, seeking new forms of representations wherein the meaning was far from clear. “Surrealism attempts to further our understanding of the human condition by seeking ways of fusing together our perceived conscious reality with our unconscious dream state” (Nik, 2006). The Spanish painter Salvador Dali became well-known in his lifetime for his unusual way of looking at things and his willingness to share these visions with the greater world population, bringing the concepts of surrealism into the mainstream and helping to define it as an artistic style. “Dalis importance for Surrealism was that he invented his own psycho technique, a method he called critical paranoia. He deliberately cultivated delusions similar to those of paranoiacs in the cause of wresting hallucinatory images from his conscious mind. Dalis images - his bent watches, his figures, halfhuman, half chest of drawers – have made him the most famous of all Surrealist painters” (Harden, 2006). Typically painting images he saw in dreams or nightmares and consistently pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter, Dali had a wide range of interests that became reflected in his artwork, such as the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud or the mathematical genius of Albert Einstein. Not every surrealist followed in Dali’s ‘psycho technique’. Frida Kahlo is among the more recognized female Surrealist artists although she experienced numerous difficulties in trying to attain her artistic career. Kahlo’s work displays a desperate struggle to find balance between the past and the present, the self and the social expectations, the conscious and the subconscious elements of herself, particularly in her 1939 self-portrait “The Two Fridas.” For Kahlo, these divisions are represented through a dual image that relates back to Kahlo’s childhood while she was recovering from polio. “During that time, she created an imaginary friend who would later be reflected in a painting called ‘The Two Fridas.’ Explaining the painting in her diary she wrote, ‘I experienced intensely an imaginary friendship with a little girl more or less the same age as me … I followed her in all her movements and while she danced, I told her my secret problems” (Beck, 2006). This relationship becomes a means of expressing the two sides of Kahlo at the time of her divorce from her artist/husband Diego. One Frida is dressed in European clothing, indicating that this is the actual European half of Frida gained from her father as well as the portion of her that Diego does not love (Stechler, 2005). Her symbolic torn bodice and broken heart indicate the rejected side of her just as her hand holds a surgical instrument intended to help stop the flow of blood from a severed connection. Blood drips down the front of her dress symbolizing the pain she has experienced. The other Frida, on the other hand, has found success and happiness in her traditional Indian clothing and the strength of her whole heart, shown despite the untorn front of her dress or chest. In her hand she holds a miniature photo of Diego, indicating the two of them will never be truly separated just as a vein extending between the two Fridas, and their clasped hands, indicate a connection that will equally never be severed or easily navigated. In each case, surrealist artists worked to make some kind of ordered sense out of the seemingly disconnected symbols and juxtapositions of their dreams and fantasies. In many cases, this approach produced images that might have been considered ridiculous and meaningless had it not been for Freud’s theories regarding the deeper hidden elements of the human mind. While the explorations might have taken place to some extent among these various artists with or without Freud, it seems clear that Freud’s ideas helped to give their thoughts and dreams shape and direction at the same time that these images were gaining significance on a broader level. This, in turn, gave the artworks thus produced greater credence within the collecting world and these artists were able to find support for their expression. Thus, without Freud’s theory that the boundary line between the conscious and the subconscious mind was not as hard and concrete as previously thought, some of these artists might not have explored their ideas to their fullest extent and may not have been able to garner the supportive audience that enabled them to continue their work. Works Cited Beck, Jennifer. “Artist Hero: Frida Kahlo.” Artist Heroes. (July 12, 2006). April 4, 2010 Breton, Andre. “The Surrealist Manifesto.” (1924). April 4, 2010 Danto, Arthur C. “Seeking ‘Convulsive Beauty.’” The Nation. (February 21, 2002).April 4, 2010 Downs, Robert B. “Sigmund Freud Publishes The Interpretation of Dreams: 1900.” 1900-1920: The Twentieth Century. Zacharias, Gary (ed.). Events that Changed the World series. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2004: 18-26. Freud, Sigmund. “The Structure of the Unconscious.” (2007). April 4, 2010 Hardin, Mark. “Dada and Surrealism.” The Archive. April 4, 2010 Hughes, Robert. Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists. London: Penguin, 1992. Nik. “About Surrealism.” Surrealism [online]. (2006) April 4, 2010 Pagewise. (2002). “Freud’s Personality Theory.” Essortment. (2002). April 4, 2010 . Phantasmagorical. The Free Dictionary. (2005). April 4, 2010 Stechler, Amy. “The Two Fridas.” The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo. 2005. Public Broadcasting Station. April 4, 2010 Read More