Political Affiliation: Surrealist

Political Affiliation: Surrealist

Yes, I am sticking to my vow not to get into politics in this blog. Instead, I want to ruminate over Surrealism, how it began, where it succeeded and failed, and how it seeped into out daily lives well before this century. For me, Surrealism is a very personal thing, and I could have equally titled this, 'Religious Affiliation: Surrealist'. After all, we are fed a bunch of contradicting stories that are supposed to have the deepest moral meaning, yet the more someone embraces mainstream Christianity, the less they act like Christ. Let me explain.

I have openly quoted the title for my entire adult life, answering anyone who questions my stance with a pithy and inscrutable answer. It is the truth, largely because I see Surrealism as a way of reacting to whatever life throws at you, especially when you have no control over the situation. And in the larger scope of things, I don't have control over the political or even social situation. I can make my own small contributions and keep plugging away, trying to make the world a better place according to my private definition. In reality, I'm about as effective as a butterfly fart in my backyard affects the weather in the southern Sahara. There's a relationship, but it's very tenuous.

So, with no control, being put on the defensive, constantly barraged with more information than any one hundred people could possibly digest, knowing that I am being lied to while my contributions to the governmental structure through taxation and voting still gets used for bombs and policies I deplore, I still have to sleep at night. I need to feel good about myself without thinking that I must become a martyr for what I know are just causes going nowhere.

During a particularly rough patch in European history, a bunch of young artists and writers, poets and film makers got together to form a strategy to cope with such events. It didn't matter; concentration camps still did their deadly work, and hydrogen bombs were dropped. But they rewrote the past their own specification, making de Sade and Comte de Lautréamont their personal saints. And they included women in their mists way before it was politically correct, including Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Leonara Carrington, and Meret Oppenheim.
France had been one of the centers of both the emerging middle class and the quest for the modern, both exemplified most splendidly in Jules Verne. This author loved progress in science and technology, trying to show the world their benefits by imagining the future. Verne wasn't stupid, and also frequently warned of the dangers of combining the mechanism of war, the lure of profits, and his beloved progress. But even his stupendous imagination couldn't foresee the mass destruction and inhumanity that awaited Europe after 1914.

The next generation speculative writer, H.G. Wells in particular, certainly predicted the devastation. Unfortunately, he took himself all too seriously and turned into a windbag know-it-all in the latter parts of his career. The Dadaists, forming in Zurich in the Middle of the War to End All Wars by a bunch of dissidents, wanted no part of these writers, anyway; Welles still trusted in science and progress to provide a solution to the problems that science and progress had caused. To be Dada was to see another way out; to turn anger into art, blasphemy into art, sacrilege into art, outrage into art, and protest into art. In short, if the general population wasn't pissed off at you, you weren't doing your job right.
Surrealism, in the fewest words possible, was a movement located mainly in France between World Wars. It was an outgrowth of Dada, which was strong stuff indeed, a direct reaction of how a progressive world had managed to become nothing more than an instrument of death, finding more efficient ways of raining death upon the rest of humanity. It this is progress, thought the Dadaists, give me madness and revolt. Dada was the punk rock of its day, designed to self-destruct in the most public way possible. Surrealism tried to tame these impulses and perhaps apply discipline and something resembling the scientific principle.

It's a great theory, but it could be hard to hard to make a living by rejecting all things rational. So Surrealism emerged around 1924, mostly a literary phenomenon. Now we only remember the most important artist and the graphic side of things; Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali and Max Ernst, to be more specific. Surrealism succeeded in capturing the public's imagination in a way that Dada never could, largely because it organized itself and created a very successful public relations campaign.

These folks didn't invent Surrealism, nor did they claim to; the lost list of artists who had worked in the field including not only writers and artists but silent comedians like Buster Keaton. Watch 'One Week' above and see how everything is put together wrong, with the front door on the second floor, and how items fluidly change function, as when the front porch rail becomes a ladder. The spinning house at the conclusion, more dream logic than anything else, was a perfect summation of the Surrealist Manifesto. And they could have fun, at least sometimes, a trait completely absent in 20th century art and culture,

The leaders of the movement were Paul Eluard and particularly Andre Breton, who ruled the group with the authority and viciousness of Joseph Stalin. Their writings are mostly forgotten today, and they were thoroughly denounced by the next generation of French intellectuals after the Second World War. That's the consequences of getting involved in politics, and Breton surely did, becoming a staunch Marxist, insisting that all other members be as well. He bullied the group into a cohesive unit that was stronger than any individual member.

The organizing principle of the Surrealist was fierce; they had a congress as well as a magazine. Their joint art exhibits were so popular and trendy that Picasso and Mira were desperate to be included. Even Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, the ultimate artists without portfolios, became members, The Surrealists did important work in film and photography, completely changed the notion of graphic design and commercial art while being an unruly bunch of hooligans in an otherwise polite art world.

Essentially, they were middle class, but they understood that success depended on constantly shocking the very social milieu that they came from. As intellectuals, they came up with the typical half-baked systems and schemes, although I am personally fond of Breton's quote, 'Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.' After they became out of fashion on the Continent, Britain and particularly America embraced them in the 1950s. During the psychedelic age, they became trendy again around the world, their fractured landscapes a perfect reflection of a newer generation's desperate attempt to drug themselves out of a horrible reality.

Interesting, but what does this all mean? Nothing at all, if that is what the viewer wants. For the first time, the audience was expected to generate meaning from the works of art. The dictatorship of the artist as the sole source of symbolism and importance was broken. Much of the art was random objects slapped together. Even Dali's famous Paranoiac Critical theory was a bunch of nonsense, a license to print money. And the public ate it up while the future mad men absorbed it, transforming it into the common language of our modern world.

The above image was a painting in 1936, and was considered a radical disembodiment of the human form. Today, it would be a boring billboard. Commercial art has stolen every aspect of Surrealism, including the twin rules of shocking and surprising the middle class. The Surrealist were among the first post-modernist, raiding cultural history and seizing only what they wanted, re-imagining the meaning and the use, just the way that the modern graphic designer does.

The Surrealists, like the Dadaists, had a well-earned distrust of logic, reason and most especially progress. The Surrealists took it one step further than the Dadaists; instead of just trying to tie a bomb around art and letting it explode in the public square, they latched onto psychoanalytic theory, especially Freud, replacing logic with the illogical, reason with the random, progress with the primitive. No more Mister Fancy Pants straight from the halls of higher learning, they wanted their art to be unfiltered straight from the deepest recesses of their unconscious.

They spent years trying to develop various methods to get creativity straight from the source; automatic writing, recording dreams, montage and frottage, hypnotism and trances. It was no accident that Andre Breton had been trained to be a psychologist. They were scientists of a sort, and they were investigating inner space. They got it all wrong, of course, but that was besides the point. History was in the process of creating a nightmare in Nazi Germany that would dwarf everything from the previous Great War, and their communist affiliations and disappearing act in the face of serious trouble undermined everything they stood for. The only thing that really remained were the images, photos and film, or so we thought.

 Take the three great artist to emerge from Surrealism, the true immediate residue. Rene Magritte wasn't French, instead Belgian, and never a card carrying member, always off to the side, and thus was safe from the critical backlash. His paintings were contemplations of suburban life, very middle class, with usually just one thing slightly odd, a substitution or transference. He remained solidly middle class as well, slightly subversive from within his social status. His simple but perplexing images were perfect for album covers right around the time of his death, and his curiosities were a perfect template for the next generations of commercial art.

They were small, well crafted puzzles, and humans are drawn to puzzles. We insist on making sense of everything, every random event and chance encounter. All things are part of a grand scheme, and we endlessly try to make patterns to fit together, the strands of our lives to have a greater purpose. It is a mechanism of the brain, a survival technique from the dawn of man; looking for food, seeing danger in tiger stripes lurking in dense foliage. Magritte limited the elements and highlighted the disparity that caused the enigma. He sold like hot cakes.

Max Ernst was one of the original Dadaist, and perhaps the most consistently imaginative and adventurist artists of the 20th century. He did it all, from sculpture to fine art to printing, while inventing frottage and perfecting montage. Ernst deserted as a German soldier in 1916 after being gassed, and was a mainstay of the Surrealist. He barely escaped Europe in 1939, a death warrant on his head by the Nazis for his 'decadent' art. His style constantly changed; he was all about the process more than the meaning. He was the one pure artist in the bunch and he was magnificent.

Ernst lived in the Arizona desert for a while after World War Two; the open space really zapped his head. He lived to be a Grand Old Master, retaining his dignity, being revered by critics and collectors. His work in printing, cutting up old engraving and transforming the images into strange and dangerous new compositions, was alone enough to ensure his place in art history. Like James Ellroy wr9iting in neo-noir, these montages take the safe past and reveal the greed and ugliness there while retaining great beauty. Towards the end, the paintings became abstract landscapes, eliminating all details that were unnecessary, relying on accidents to create textures.

The most famous, and most problematic member of the Surrealist was undoubtedly Salvador Dali. Dali's personality was as important as his art; he invented outrage as a means of constant publicity, and sought the spotlight constantly on two continents, even if it meant being a clown on camera. He created and spoke as much gibberish as meaning, but it was the way he spoke that was important, not the message. I'm surprised someone hasn't mashed up our current President with Salvador; they both make an equal amount of sense combined with the same big gestures and odd vocal cadence.

The message is designed to be farcical, but the presentation, so florid and over the top, creates an artificial (or should we say alternative) importance that carries the day. He created a brand with his trademark moustache, one of those few public figures who could be spotted from a mile away, even if you didn't know what he did to be so famous. Dali perfected the notion that no publicity was bad publicity as long as it kept you in the public eye. One couldn't imagine Frank Zappa without Dali, nor Donald Trump.

Although Dali's career both began and ended in scandal and he was generally thought to be either a madman or a charlatan, in truth he was very rich and enjoyed the good life, laughing all the way to the bank. As for his art, he tried everything once and certainly created some masterpieces amongst the thousands of pieces he turned out. In my opinion, he was the perfect Surrealist because he was kicked out so early. Asked to defend himself to the Surrealist congress, he showed up in a deep sea diver's outfit, talking even more incoherently until passing out from lack of oxygen. Breton did not see the humor in the situation. I do, and think it is a hilarious middle finger to a group taking itself too seriously.

Dali also developed the craftsmanship and technique to attract an audience outside of the normal bohemian art crowd. He reconciled with Franco, the Fascist dictator of Spain, and became a born-again Catholic. Some of his most beautiful paintings are religious subjects, enough to make any modern art critic have a cardiac infarction. Working with everyone from Hitchcock and Disney to Alice Cooper, he managed to be the last living artist to become a household name. And he remained funny, even if the joke was on you. As art became more a rich man's tool, incomprehensible garbage at an astronomical price, Dali took the money while sending up the situation. He had a particularly twisted kind of genius, as much for publicity as for his art.

It is the humor as well as the shock of Surrealism that remains, even after all the advertising and comic art rip-off of the last eighty years. It is, after all, a coping mechanism for insane times, a way to look at the absurdity of the world, spoken by highly paid corporate flunkies with a straight face. It is a way to call 'bullshit' without getting thrown in jail. It is a way to subvert the norm in a subtle ways, to digest the staggering array of lies and distortions, weaponize it, and throw it back in their face. Simple; turn everything on its head, see the humor in the juxtapositioning, and spit it back out at them. Too bad we can't laugh all the way to the bank as well.