Surrealist Photography - Essay Example

Surrealism and Photography 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. The work of Sigmund Freud and his understanding of the human mind had a great impact on the development of surrealism, but the similarly new field of photography truly opened up the field to new speculation. 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. In this sense, photography, which was taken to be a true representation of the world surrounding us, was developed as a means of making this connection between the perceived reality and the underlying truth. “In the works of Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, the use of such procedures as double exposure, combination printing, montage and solarization dramatically evoked the union of dream and reality. Other photographers used techniques such as rotation or distortion to render their images uncanny” (Photography and Surrealism, 2000). Numerous photographers began using their cameras to depict images that existed outside of their natural contexts and thus demonstrated something strange, different or unexpected in the finished product. In creating these images, the photographers were causing their audiences to also question what is real and what is mere perception. They revealed emotional reactions to objects, discovered dreamscapes in the center of the city and exposed uncomfortable perceptions to be the result of a failure to look at things in a different way. “Even the most prosaic photograph, filtered through the prism of Surrealist sensibility, might easily be dislodged from its usual context and irreverently assigned a new role. Anthropological photographs, ordinary snapshots, movie stills, medical and police photographs – all of these appeared in Surrealist journals like La Revolution Surrealiste and Minotaure, radically divorced from their original purposes” (Photography and Surrealism, 2000). 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 Breton, Andre. “The Surrealist Manifesto.” (1924). May 15, 2010 Danto, Arthur C. “Seeking ‘Convulsive Beauty.’” The Nation. (February 21, 2002). May 15, 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). May 15, 2010 Hardin, Mark. “Dada and Surrealism.” The Archive. May 15, 2010 Hughes, Robert. Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists. London: Penguin, 1992. Nik. “About Surrealism.” Surrealism [online]. (2006) May 15, 2010 Pagewise. (2002). “Freud’s Personality Theory.” Essortment. (2002). May 15, 2010 . Phantasmagorical. The Free Dictionary. (2005). May 15, 2010 “Photography and Surrealism.” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. May 15, 2010 Read More