Surrealism Is 100
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As an indication of how engaged that community is, when a paper is given over Zoom, it's not unusual to get 80-90 people in that Zoom all actively engaging with the content and discussing for several hours.
In HN terms, those weird things aren't a bug, they're a feature.
https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/courses/111...
But it seems to be one of those revolutions based on a single idea. And when you see it, understand it, appreciate it, there is nothing more (original) to be said.
It does not age well. There is not a semi-infinite 'fountain' of newly interesting surrealism (other than your own dreams). It can span the contextual artifact of Duchamp (you know the one), through the mild jarring of Magritte, to the impeccable fine art of Dalí, and the architecture of Gaudí, but not much more (okay maybe the magical realist writings of Gabriel García Márquez et al.).
Perhaps that is the lifespan: the urinal (1917) to '100 Years of Solitude' (1967), exactly 50 years, no more.
It's a one-trick-pony. In many cases, someone could describe a piece verbally, I would get the intention, the joke, and enjoy it, but never feel the need to see the work itself - what more could it possibly say?
Most contemporary surrealism is just cashing in on a very good old idea. It is now a cliché.
In some contexts, the more surrealist you claim to be, the more 'authentically' obscure you can make the connection to reality, the more impatiently some important gallery wants to show your work, the more big ignorant donors give to the gallery, and the higher the prices for the work. The three are connected, of course, in the boring vicious spiral of the artist-gallery-donor-speculator industrial complex (or virtuous circle if you are getting a cut).
Luckily, AI is coming to the rescue, showing that even robots dream of electric sheep, and hallucination is a common artifact of the only two intelligences we know about. There is not more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your human/AI philosophy. Surrealism can be generated in a mouse click, which will kick the stool out from under the fake surrealist modern art market. Good.
> It does not age well. There is not a semi-infinite 'fountain' of newly interesting realism (other than your own reality). It can span the rough drawings of buffaloes (you know the ones), through the flat forms of hieroglyphics, to the impeccable fine art of Vermeer, and the architecture of Burnham, but not much more (okay maybe the spare documentarian writings of Ernest Hemingway et al.).
I think in both cases, this is oddly reductive. The reality is that there is a huge continuum of different ideas from both "reality" and "surreality" and the mixture of the two, some of which have been fruitfully explored, but most of which haven't.
I think maybe what you're responding to is the fundamental success of surrealism. Nobody argues any longer that the only "right" way to do art is to seek ever more verisimilitude. That's just the water we all swim in now, without needing to realize we're wet. But that's freeing, not limiting.
Surrealism was quite late to the grave-dancing ceremony, perhaps 80 years after the first photograph, so not much connection. Maybe there had to be an Impressionist interlude, with some transitional squinting at external reality, before art could become truly introspective.
Surrealism was even a few decades after Freud, but hot on the heels of Cubism, other fin-de-siècle Modernisms, and roughly contemporary with stream-of-consciousness writing (Proust, Joyce, Woolf, also Kafka).
[Also, the role of WWI cannot be underestimated. It cleared the landscape in many ways, destroyed old contexts (e.g. death of Futurism), launched desperate soul-searching, and was existentially challenging at every level - a long sidebar to be had there.]
Culture seems rather slow to adapt to science. Interestingly, there is little traffic in the other direction, but math & physics also had their modern moments just before - Paris Math Congress 1900, Planck 1900, Einstein 1905...
Perhaps sci-fi fiction prefigures future technology? But while there are a few famed prophets (H.G.Wells, W.Gibson), they are mostly hindisght/survivor bias. The genre has success in the same way that a shotgun kills a pigeon. Very little insight, lots of trajectories, few hits.
dadaist ideas were continued to be picked up by the avant guard over years, and as predictable recuperated with various degrees of success. one can trace a line of ideas from dadaists to punks, for example, and its easier to understand what is the relationship between dadaism and surrealism, by looking at the way punk was very rapidly stripped of its political potential and reduced to representation only.
it has become significantly hard to do, but one should go see kazemir malevich's "black square" at the tretyakov galery of art in moscow. none of the digital copies, that are mere representation, do it justice. the piece oozes power in person, it's a long subdued power, that we also have to see through the prism of gulags and terror that followed, but its a raw power of men, an ability to accomplish things both awesome and terrifying, to wrought matter into form. that power terrifies those who were in power at the time AND those who are in power now. disregard all that peasant, look it's a fish floating through a rain of melting clocks! dahlin, isn't it so maavelous and inventive.
Your comment misses the political dimensions of Surrealism. They swayed between Leninist and Libertarian socialism. The entire point of the movement was to resist neoliberal tendencies, which produced disasters like the World Wars, etc.
See: Sadie Plant's The Most Radical Gesture for a description of the relationship between Dada, Surrealism, and the SI.
i'm not missing the political dimension of surrealism, i'm deliberately ignoring it. there's two of us in these comments who are aware of these political dimensions, where's society's perspective on surrealism is duchamp's fountain and dali's persistence of memory. surrealist art is a one trick pony, that is at fault for how easily it was recuperated. situatonists argued that this dimension was built in from the very beginning.
Furthermore, as a Marxist, he'd have to admit the dialectical (material) influence of surrealism and its offshots, including his.
Also - Situationist tactics are just as prone to recuperation as Surrealism. Anti-advertising, street art, etc. are totally integrated.
To add further nuance, Surrealism continued after Breton, et al. Surrealist groups still exist and were acting in parallel to the Situationists in the late '60s. For example, the Chicago group emerged from the Industrial Workers of the World/SDS, staged interventions (a la situations) and were among the first to distribute Situationist literature through their bookshop.
surrealist groups keep dragging a dead corpse around. there's nothing wrong with that, in same way as improv clubs are a perfectly acceptable leisure activities for the laptop class.
we can definitely agree that both surrealist and situationist tactics are at this point fully integrated. but then traditional protest tactics have been at this point fully integrated: you know si celebrating watts riots, but the covid riots might as well be a perfect case study on the nature of recuperation. i doubt op new york times writer thinks she's being anything but clever, but you know everything about it is a neat little mockery of our collective impotence.
there are lessons that we can derive from si writing AND surrealist works, but i don't think goofy "one simple hack the spectacle hates!" are it.
Not sure why, but Jeff Koons just popped into my head. Yes, grifters aplenty.
(apologies if I missed a /sarc in there, next to the success :)
I also find strong links between surrealism and curiosity in general, don't know why Marcel Duchamp [1] is not mentioned there but he was some kind of polymath and art was another tool on his box.
Duchamp didn’t publish almost any art in his last decades, but his posthumously unveiled final work is absolutely worth seeing in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s surprising and unique and hard to explain in words. (One day, centuries from now, I imagine/hope there will be a constant crowd in the museum just waiting for their turn to peek at the ancient Duchamp, like for Mona Lisa today…)
What a wonderful time to be alive.