Salvador Dalis Surrealist Concept of Paranoia - Essay Example

A Freudian Painter Genius I. Introduction J.H. Matthews argues that surrealism “is a higher sense of reality” (Duran, 1989: 297). It is difficult to discern who are the surrealist and the precise definition of the movement surrealism. Commonly, in literature the description is occasionally appropriated by critics to ‘card-carrying’ affiliates of the movement and sometimes to authors who convey themselves in a manner usually recognized to be surrealistic, such as the application of automatic writing, in-depth immersion to the unconscious, to Freud, to scandalous concurrences; in works of art, a number of artists, regardless of their styles and techniques or intellectual memberships, cannot be attributed as whatever thing but surrealist. Only a scholar would rebuff that Dali was a surrealist since he was expelled from the movement. Indeed, Dali participated in the surrealists program in the early thirties and, in his personal frame of mind, was envoy of the movement’s majority, which he regarded to be detrimental of aged values, revolutionary and unprincipled; he has alleged Andre Breton as the one who truly betrayed the movement with his socialist bearing and metaphysical knowledge (ibid). Salvador Dali tested out automatism but discovered it below his standards, as can voluntarily be understood if one is familiar with the canvasses of Abstract Expressionist, which draw on the automatism style, and when compared with the highly refined, almost crystal clear surfaces Dali obliged; then, there would be on no account, for instance, that one could visualize a bit like the Ghent Altarpiece of the van Eyck brothers surfacing on panes through practicing pristine spontaneity (Danto, 1994: 1). Automaticity loans itself to “scribbles, splashes, sweeps and dashes of paint or ink—to doodles, however fraught” (1) and in all respects Dali found it a procedure in sum too submissive for his objective. He then turned into on what he referred to as the technique of critical paranoia, and there is a clause of his bizarre declaration of guilt, entitled ‘The Secret Life of Salvador Dali’ designated as the ‘Critical-Paranoiac Activity Versus Automatism’. The concept of critical paranoiac may appear to be a negation; however, the method of paranoia is typically subjected to some system of intrinsically consistent false beliefs that a person upholds resistant from criticism. It implies that the belief of the majority is considered false by the paranoiac. Dali, in an essay of 1927, candidly showed his concern as an artist to discard the beliefs that characterize normality in order to be familiarized to the world with unadulterated sight. According to Dali, “People only see stereotyped images of things, pure shadows empty of any expression, pure phantoms, and they find vulgar and normal everything they are used to seeing often, however marvelous and miraculous it may be” (1). Hence, it is apparent that Dali’s objective is to revive reality as awe-inspiring, and this implies portrayal in a paramount vividly naturalistic manner he could master: commonplace, usually identifiable items, in plain radiance, casting brilliant shadows. Husserl, a philosopher, formulated a watchword which states that “to the things themselves” and the phenomenological method, which he designed, involved a definite deferral of belief and a surrendering of thyself to untainted experience (Dawn, 1982). The disparity between the phenomenological and the critic-paranoid schemes lie in this fact, that Husserl aimed to capture the world as perfectly as it exhibits itself to the unbiased eyes, as if to a visual tool; whilst Dali, having counteracted the conventionality of common sense, viewed the world as if it is external to his mind, letting all his anxieties and trepidations, his inhibited desires and feral organizations, to submerge again into reality, hence the world becomes the stage of purposeful dread and terrifying accomplishments (Sarane, 1970). As Dali had movingly put it in plain words, “My things… are anti-artistic and direct. They move and are understood instantaneously, without the slightest technical training” (Danto, 1994: 2). For Dali, artistic training is actually the foremost impediment in seeing the truth behind the façade of a work of art. Dali made his crafts devoid of enthusiasm or animation, so that the eyes do not deviate from the objects exposed, pronouncing as it were, that the most important element is the thing that is directly shown, and the image being a nonentity of its own to contribute to individual experiences, and the picture being empty other than its substance (Nadeau, 1989). The unconventional and rather liberal techniques of Salvador Dali have wide-ranging repercussions to each of the various types of art, specifically in graphic arts, photography and cinema. II. Concrete Art and Autonomous Graphic Art It had become progressively more obvious that non-representational appearances have the capability of optical magnetism, which, nevertheless, has power over extremely different degrees of success, which is reliant in each case on the process the artist has handled the pristine form and pure color (Stube, 1963). An innovative standard of artistic power, pioneered by Salvador Dali through his critical paranoia, relevant to abstract conception apparently rely in the force of the coerciveness with which nonfigurative work proposes to the eye that it is gaining knowledge on something worthwhile, even though this significance eludes commonsensical clarity. Not merely artists voluntarily acknowledged the precision of such effects following a preliminary instance of amazement; even the logically broadminded beholder unadulterated with permanent aesthetic formations eventually admitted defeat in rejecting them. The artist becomes used to no longer anticipating simply exact messages from the masterpiece and perceiving it as an exceptional kind of origin of wisdom in which sentimental elements are absolutely dynamic, but whose content is in the conclusive analysis established cognitively and exposed to discursive opinion. The artist then now examined that the communication between an image and thyself no longer has the feature of enlightening, and that an abstract creation has to be evaluated not according to its capability for fashioning statements, since there is nothing expressive in it, yet according to its power of prayers (ibid). The artist discovered that a soul could not acquire the appreciation of such works through statements provable by allusion to something or other openly provided. Thus, in sight of this modern pictorial optics, there materialized pretty logically from the reflection on aesthetics verified by the form-content dualism the query, “Does form not directly depend on something that, for its part, is not form?” (Praeger, 1963: 203). Majority of the responses given during the premature days of abstract works were in confirmatory, and of them is Salvador Dali. Just like him, albeit the audience had stopped to regard as an attribute of the work of art its property of being the representation of a substance both appropriate to something genuine and describable in words, they still glimpse in art a dimension of expression brazening out the real world (Murray, 2003). In actuality, they analyze the work of art as a fabricated item conveying something internally essential, which means that they continue in belief to the form-content framework; fundamentally, therefore, to the core pattern of thought though which art had formerly been expounded. Only recently, as this insight was replicated in contemporary art, a spirit-form meets head-on the nature-form. If one referred this spirit-form abstract, it implies that the individual was still connecting it intimately with the nature-form from which it had been distant (Russel, 1981). Yet, the important thing is, on the opposite, is to validate the definite divergence of spirit- and nature-form and to claim that the spirit-form mistakenly classified as abstract is just as existent as concrete form. Modern graphic art’s ornately facetted exterior, which encompasses contrasts, becomes obvious, which is reminiscent of Dali’s crystal clear surface. Everywhere graphic art was facilitating to understand exceptionally remarkable, very daring desire, for whose epithet frequently not even the naked outline of a recognized conception was readily available. Additionally, graphic technique underwent constant trials and explored opportunities for attaining fresh surface qualities and structural conditions that rest afar the breadth of painterly techniques. Graphic art obtained completely special payments, nevertheless, in effect of a continuously increasing tendency previously apparent at the time of the initial experiments with abstract outlines. It is manifested in the modification of character endured by the work of art as a physical object (Stubbe, 1963). The intellectual motive of the creations did not receive contributions from canvas, paint layer, sheet and impressed mass of ink from then on. It harmonized with the image’s delusional property, which perforce entailed a rejection of the image shell, since it handled the structure of the image as a window-frame through which an audience gazed into an imaginary space, to eliminate bearing and paint; as well as the materials concerning the graphic image, which are paper and ink, from the cognitive space in which outlines become pictorial trends (ibid). Adopting Dali’s objective of excluding false impressionistic orientations to reality, the character of the material design, whether painted or printed, transformed. From the subject to which it fitted in as a sheer necessity of outcomes stirring in the mind, from its responsibility of merely being a section of the work of art, despite its essentiality for practical reasons, did not take part in the aesthetic conclusion, this product endured onwards to become a primary factor of the artistic effect itself. Thus far, a requirement to duplicate an artistic design, the painting as an object or the print as theme at the moment assumed on the nature of an artistic object (Janson, 1962). Immediately as art itself no longer desires to be an observing interpreter of exterior forms and attempts instead to offer from the self-rule of its own characteristic for the indiscernible, hence the material structure aims to be freed from its secondary task of being a channel of expression not itself existent to the intellect. Simultaneously, there started a calculated blurring of the creative classes. Salvador Dali’s conception of the attributes and power of pure form also incorporates the meaningful objective from which artistic design now acquires its deep-seated meaning. Prescribed elements are no longer dangled on the frame of nature-forms. Hence, in graphic arts, they no longer produce through previous content, from within a specified pattern therefore, that essence which constitutes the fundamental quality of the work of art. The visual components of a masterpiece such as colors, lines and forms, are combined as an abstract association and compressed into an intellectual importance without giving impetus to the concept of an object. This kind of pictorial movement is practiced primarily in order to grasp the mysteries of the observable world. The duty of art is now to understand reality while eluding the details of its façade that amuses one from what is truly essential (Stubbe, 1963). Art materializes out of meditative behavior and manifests, through this aesthetic reflection, on forces and standards in the foundation of existence. III. Photography: An Image of Objectivity and Independence The counterpart of Abstract Expressionism in painting in photography is ‘pictorialism’ and the one that resembles Salvador Dali’s style and artistic method is ‘straight photography’. Pictorialism, as detractors usually describe, is an abomination to the field of photography. They strongly believe that pictorialism rebuffs and distort the genuine nature of photography, disrespectfully replicated painting, and displayed an oppressive steam of unstable subjectivity. On the other hand, straight photography was precise, objective, self-directed and blatantly founded on systematic processes. At the same time, straight photography was still accepted as high art (Newhall, 1938). However, according to some critiques, straight photography had far more common characteristic with Pictorialism than the advocates of straight photography were ready to admit. Even though straight photography detached itself from the forceful subjectivity of Pictorialism, they were still fascinated in personal expression and in turning photographs that exceed the reference image to signify something differently portrayed in terms of intensity, sharpness, or spirituality. Straight photography and Pictorialism also shares a common rival in profit-making photography (Shawcross, 1997). Just like Salvador Dali, straight photographers treated their individual produce as priceless items, suspended them in balconies or distributed their images though first-class book imitation, and in general, intended their art toward a small, approving audience, rather than the public majority. Straight photographers, nevertheless, in the mode of the Pictorialists prior to them, dedicated themselves in deviating from money-making motives (ibid). In relation to Salvador Dali, the straight photographers’ dislike of photography as a means of gaining monetary value is somehow reflective of Dali’s concern on the substance of an art as an independent reference point in which audience could perceive a plethora of things independent of the exterior appearance of a work of art. In order to achieve this critical paranoia, which is for Dali is an essential method in truly grasping the actual elements of an art, individual interests and motives should be set aside. Furthermore, the straight aesthetic embodied an attempt to characterize the exceptional and fundamental attributes of photography and to emphasize the medium’s autonomy so as to bring into line the primary principles of modernism. The straight aesthetic was also an attempt to fashion a fused scientific and aesthetic paradigm (Savedoff, 2000). Straight photographers grip their medium as purposeful and systematic in keeping with the principles of science. They are inclined to conceive of their work of art as emerging from its foundation in science and technology to rise above the material world and achieve a domain of universal spirit (ibid). With respect to Salvador Dali’s critical paranoia, the Abstract Expressionism seems to pursue spirituality in a peculiar, inner mental picture whereas the critical-paranoiac activity pursued spirit through explorations of the superficial world. Those who confronted the modern milieu believed they were making use of photography to permeate with the spirit of humanity which is if not, was antagonistic and lifeless materiality. The others searched for the fundamental spirituality of nature. Viewed in a sympathetic sense, straight photography is implicit in its technique and inspiring in its insight into the contemporary circumstance or the religious power of innate magnificence. Appreciated in a critical light, the straight artistic is acutely blemished. First, there are no reasonable grounds why the straight method should be received as an expression of the true soul of photography. The system differs over time; it fluctuated from one artist to another, and generally, the limits between what was recognized pure photography and what was acknowledged exploitation were most of the time formless and illogical (Newhall, 1938). Nonetheless, the limitations of straight photography are effortlessly perceived from the viewpoint of the present, yet in the premature periods of the twentieth century it was a feasible alternative to Pictorialism. Regrettably, as Pictorialism declined, consequently the institutional sustenance for the entire photographic art community in several developed nations, abandoned straight photographers in an insecure status (Savedoff, 2000). However, Salvador Dali would have defended straight photography as an objective form of photography since he will argue that the photographer revere the thing in front of the camera. Dictated by critical paranoia, it is highly likely that Dali’s influence to photography, particularly straight photography, is the notion that the serious expression of it is something steered by spontaneous knowledge, and as a strength that might revolutionize the materialism of science. Moreover, Dali might have inspired the bringing together of objectivity and expressiveness in photography. IV. The Cinema in the Nineteenth Century: Predominantly Surreal The examination of the two-dimensional relationship between cinema and the artistic ultramodern of the 1920s and the 1930s has frequently presented a valuable idea into the progression of contemporary film theory and tradition. The surrealist code of poetic drifting apart, which is arbitrary visual recognition, motivated the most unforeseen social relations across an expansive array of film genres and techniques (Tudor, 1974). Robert Desnos, one of the most committed surrealist novelists for the cinema and who quite resembles Salvador Dali in several ways, distinguished a widespread innovative truthfulness where others would most likely observe stark dissimilarities between the director’s strategies, editing and theme selection (Fox, 2002). Some of the films in the nineteenth century that are classified within the boundaries of Desno’s principle are, “Sergei Einstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925-6), Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), Erich Von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1925) and Luis Buñuels Un Chien andalou (1929)” (Fotiade, 1998: 109). These movies were categorized to the same rebellious thread of productions anticipated to destroy the law and order of elite establishments, from the government to the family, from spirituality to art and ethics. An in-depth analysis of the selected movies aforementioned, one may argue that the precise common feature of the films in which surrealism claimed its due rest in their non-profit and non-narrative character. As the end of the 1920s approached, the surrealist writers for the cinema evaluated the involvement which the movement established to the development of the early French film making, and claimed that the interaction between the cinema and surrealism did not produced works of art or a fresh artistic design, but created a channel to reflective, original instincts which needed to be provided with a new form (Melly, 1991). Concerns on form and language were placed at the center of the arguments that, at some stage in the 1920s and the 1930s, dealt with surrealism with futuristic tendencies within, or on the limits of, the movie industry. The growth of French cinema to the arrival of audio effects in 19290 to 1930 corresponds with one of the most vibrant periods in literary and art chronicles (ibid). The control of the cinema, as the embodiment of modernity, was substantial among the young group of writers, which most of them are in its populist quality an iconoclastic standpoint that propped up their assessment of scholastic efforts and tradition. Together with Dadaist authors and cubist, creative thinker or innovative painters of the period, surrealists aimed that the new-fangled medium would present a revolutionary tongue which would surpass both the stagnant nature of painting and the weaknesses of verbal or written language, in order to become the medium of intellectual art (Tudor, 1974). The examination of the two-dimensional relationship between the film and the artistic modernism of the 1920s and the 1930s illustrates issues connected to both assumptions of film and language in the arts, particularly in photography and painting. Majority of the artists who attempted to prematurely conduct experiments with film were Dadaist artists or had been mixed up in photography prior to becoming engrossed in the cinema. The pioneers of the surrealist movement in France began to write down film reviews and brief situations years prior to the publication of the “First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924” (Fotiade, 1998: 110). The era immediately foregoing the surfacing of surrealism was for majority of these writers “the age of cinema” (ibid). Fascinating connections can be deduced between the unearthing of the “cinematographic image, of editing, and the ‘automatic writing’” (ibid) suggested by Breton and his colleagues as a deconstructivist method, revealing the unconscious workings of desire in their disconnected, irrational form, hostile to the predisposition towards consistency and entirety of the systematic discussion and logical thought. V. Conclusion The Surrealists were a society of artists who aim to explore an intrinsic reality outside the rational world. Largely influenced by one of the key figures in psychoanalytic theory, Sigmund Freud, Surrealist painters frequently draw on symbols to illustrate strange, fantasy-like backdrops. Salvador Dali was one of the primary figures of the Surrealist movement and one of the most notorious. He was fascinated by Freud’s insights of the unconscious mind, and the representational implication these insights contained influenced greatly his artistic creations. Dali, afar from several other Surrealists, merged realism into his bizarre scenery, providing them a disquieting, recognizable quality. His objective was to document unconscious elements as accurately as possible. Dali was no secluded genius. Apparently, he had a complicated, unusual association with the modern world, and that association improved his solemn art. Moreover, Dali is often branded as a blatant self-publicist to whom the individual-centered orientation provided an in-depth scope for pretentiousness. Glancing at one thing and seeing another is, obviously, one method of expressing the paranoiac-critical style that created a divisive name for Dali. Whether the representations themselves were, as Dali asserted, scoured from the deepness of his id is rather more controversial; as Dali proclaimed, “The difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad” (Bray, 2007: 1). All his artistic endeavors are in deference to Sigmund Freud for having enlightened the configuration of the mind, yet the volume of Dali’s images are fewer windows into his subconscious world than manifestations of his artistic brilliance. Dali, without a doubt, begot the all-embracing spectrum of the surrealist movement. Works Cited Ades, Dawn. Dali. London: Thames and Hudson, 1982. Alexandrian, Sarane. Surrealist Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1970. Bray, Christopher. "Dream Catcher: In Cinema, Salvador Dali Found the Ideal Medium." New Statesman 136.4848 (2007). Danto, Arthur C. "Salvador Dali." The Nation 259.6 (1994). Duran, Gloria. "The Antipodes of Surrealism: Salvador Dali and Remedios Varo." Symposium 42.4 (1989). Fotiade, Ramona. "The Slit Eye, the Socrpion and the Sign of the Cross: Surrealist Film Theory and Practice Revisited." Screen (1998). Fox, Brian J. "Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique." The Review of Metaphysics 54.2 (2000). Janson, H.W. History of Art. New York: Abrams, 1962. Melly, George. Paris and the Surrealists. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Murray, Chris. Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 2003. Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1989. Newhall, Beaumont. Photography: A Short Critican History. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938. Russell, John. The Meanings of Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art and Harper and Row, 1981. Savedoff, Barbara. Transforming Images: How Photography Complicates the Picture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Shawcross, Nancy. Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical Tradition in Perspective. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997. Stubbe, Wolf. Graphic Arts in the Twentieth Century. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963. Tudor, Andrew. Theories of Film. New York: Viking Press, 1974. Read More