Surrealism

Surrealism promised to free the mind, of rational control, by exposing the subconscious mind of man…. These philosophical forerunners of the Absurd movement preached a new psychology based on combining the dreaming state with the waking state. The goal was to find a new reality, a kind of sur (‘above’) reality.

—Acting in Person and in Style, Jerry Crawford

Introduction

Surrealism was a movement in visual art and literature that flourished in Europe between the two World Wars. It represented a reaction against what its proponent considered the destruction caused by the ‘rationalism’ that had guided European culture and politics previously and that had culminated in the horrors of the World War I. Surrealists drew heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. They wanted to bypass the social conventions and education to explore the subconscious, for which they also devised some techniques like automatism (i.e. automatic writing) etc.

Surrealism grew principally after the earlier Dada movement (or Dadaism), which, during the World War I, produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason. Dadaism was an art movement that was against everything that has to do with its contemporary society and art. It was anti-logic, anti-aesthetic and anti-idealistic. It was born out of mayhem (means “chaos”), as a response to the horrors of the World War I—it’s bloodshed and brutality. As the movement was anti-rational, much of its creativity centred around the absurd, the irrational.

Surrealism’s emphasis, however, was not on negation (means “denial of things/ideas”) (e.g. the absurdism and chaos of Dadaism), but on positive expression. It did not inherit Dadaism’s nihilistic, anti-rationalist critiques of society and its unrestrained attacks on formal artistic conventions. Although, Surrealism did adopt Dada’s preoccupation with the bizarre, the irrational and the fantastic as well as Dadaist’s reliance on accident and chance. The surrealists questioned the rationality and logic of the world around them and sought to challenge traditionally held beliefs. They looked for the connection between dreams, instincts, subliminal desire and the creative process.