October 15, 1999, “Surrealism” text for a multi-media performance at Penny Lane

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SURREALISM

In December 1919, the poet Tristan Tzara, one of the art terrorists who helped plot the Dadaist’s attack on culture at the Caberet Voltaire, arrived in Paris from Zurich. World War I was over and the pacifist Roumanian writer was free to travel. When he arrived in Paris, he quickly joined a group of poets including Andre Breton, Benjamin Peret, Paul Eluard, Francis Picabia, Louis Aragon, Marcel Duchamp, and Arthur Cravan. Most of these poets were still in their early twenties and lived in Montmartre, alienated from the established artists who lived mostly on the Left Bank. The effect of Tzara’s arrival–according to Breton–was that “his mere presence finally put an end to all the banal respectable discussions which at that time were increasingly reducing Paris to a provincial level.”

            Several of the writers who would come to be known as the Surrealists had been involved in the Great War, including Louis Aragon, Guillaime Apollinaire, and Andre Breton. In fact, Breton had been an assistant physician at the neurological hospital in Nantes where, in 1916, he met the poet Jacques Vache, a patient who had completely stepped outside of reality and created his own fantasy world. Vache’s drawings, writings, and behavior became a beacon to Breton and others as an example of how what is called madness can actually be seen as the greatest artistic creation possible. Despite it all, Vache committed suicide in 1919.

Later, in St. Dizier psychiatric center for the insane, Breton began drawing pictures of the patients’ dreams and conducting sessions of free association that he had learned from the writings of Sigmund Freud. Through these experiments, Breton became convinced that reality was a mass-hallucination from which many people, including saints, sages, and madmen, had escaped.

The simplest, most obvious, and most common experience of non-rational reality was the world each of us visited every night in our dreams. But there were many others as well. As the philosopher William James had written in The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902:

Some years ago I myself made some observations on nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

The Surrealists began experiencing with these alternative mental states through the use of drugs, alcohol, hypnosis, trance states, and other artificial sleep conditions. What they discovered was that these states could be induced and were repeatable, but that they could not be controlled. In fact, many of their experiments were broken off in 1923. The participants had lost weight and became irritable and nervous. For example, while in a trance the poet Robert Desnos had gone after Paul Eluard with a knife.

But what they’d learned they would never forget: namely, that reality changed depending on states of mind, and that states of mind could be altered at will. As the Surrealist Marcel Jean wrote “one can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of shapes in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a face, a palace, and so on. Any prospect or object of the physical world can be treated in this manner and so it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all.” Sober reality was a choice, and just one choice among many, but it was the most pernicious one in that it denied and repressed and attempted to control and limit everything that challenged its supremacy. And its main means of control was the mass hallucination of acceptable social conventions.

The first use of the word “surrealism” was in the program notes by Guillaime Apollinaire for Eric Satie’s ballet “Parade,”–choreography by Massine, masks and sets by Picasso, danced by Diaghilev. Later Apollinaire would describe his play “Les Mamelles de Tiresias” as a “surrealist drama.” Both Breton and Eluard were present at the premiere of Apollinaire’s play “Couleur du temps,” described in Breton’s novel Nadja as a contributing factor in the formation of Surrealism by igniting their interest in Hazard and Chance.

But it wasn’t until Andre Breton’s “First Surrealist Manifesto,” published on October 15, 1924, that the word was defined as

Pure psychic automatism, by which orally or in writing or in any other form, one attempts to express the pure functions of thought; thought dictated without any control by logic, beyond any aesthetic or ethical considerations…. Surrealism is based on belief in the superior reality of certain hitherto neglected forms of association, in the omnipotence of dream, and the undirected play of thought. It aims for the final destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution in their place as a solution to the main problems of life.

It is significant that Breton presented his definition in accepted scientific terms. The Dadaists had enjoyed pure attacks on anything and everything, but Breton not only wanted to destroy bourgeois complacency, he also wanted to substitute something else, something he insisted would be “a solution to the main problems in life.”

In 1925, the Surrealists opened the Central Bureau of Surrealist Research with Antonin Artaud as its director. Their publications included “La Revolution Surrealist,” designed to look like a scientific publication, edited by the poet Benjamin Peret and literary critic Pierre Navill. Their motto was “We must attain a new declaration of human rights.” It was decidedly anti-religious, and, although it claimed spiritual guides in Buddha and the Dalai Lama, it also included complex questionnaires and information on suicide. At their center they arranged sessions in order to explore, without inhibitions, subjects such as “woman” and “sexuality.” These dialogues, transcriptions, and surveys feature candid discussions of the actual sex lives of identified male and female Surrealists. They struggled to discover what their real feelings really were–as well as exploring any other possible alternatives and their consequences.

The Surrealists decided to embark on a program of systematic destruction of the boundaries of acceptable reality and ultimately of society itself, which functioned, in their eyes, solely as a means of control. They hoped to create and then propagate a new form of life that did not suppress basic human needs. They even went so far as to seriously and quasi-scientifically attend classes on Hegel and Einstein at the Academy, but they found these discussions too general and verbal–they were only interested in what was beyond the intellect. They no longer trusted anyone other than themselves and wanted to directly experience their subjective reality or none at all.

Take sex for example. Like Dada, Surrealism questioned the concept of “moral purity”–their ultimate goal was to celebrate the unconscious and establish a sense of life based on human desire rather than any unreal code of social imperative and convention. As such, sex was at its root a mixture of desire, biology, and pleasure, yet its expression had somehow become a matter of social conventions and religious concepts of sin and morality. It no longer bore any resemblance to what it was meant to be or could be. There was now an artificial and unhealthy rift between acceptable behavior and the elementary needs of eroticism and sexuality, which, as Freud explained, could be suppressed and repressed but never destroyed. This had twisted something passionately healthy, human, intimate, and capable of great beauty into ugly, confused secret lives, colored by shame, perversion, cruelty, and lies. Any form of life was preferable to this.

The Surrealist program was not created out of whole cloth. Many of their processes and beliefs had long traditions–some dating back to Heraclitus and Buddha, and their teachings on impermanence and the primacy of the present moment. Like Ovid in “The Metamorphoses,” they could see that there were many levels of reality operating in every moment, and that gods were constantly becoming human, that humans sometimes behaved like animals or gods, and that animals could be gods in disguise. Visual representations of these alternative, often hellish, realities could be seen in the works of previous poets and painters such as William Blake and Heironymous Bosch. Even some of the processes practiced by visual artists such as Max Ernst had actually been described by Renaissance painters such as Leonardo da Vinci in his “Treatise on Painting”:

It is not to be despised, in my opinion, if after gazing fondly at a spot on the wall, coals in the grate, clouds, or a flowing stream, that one remembers some of their aspects, and if you look at them carefully you will discover some quite witnessable inventions. Of these the genius of the painter may take full advantage, to compose battles of men and animals, landscapes or monsters, devils and other fantastic things.

As for their more direct descendants, the Surrealists looked to the experimental writings of Guillaime Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Jarry, Arthur Rimbaud, and the Comte de Lautreamont, who was the author of a sentence much-quoted as the essence of Surrealism: “It was as beautiful as the accidental encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an autopsy table.”

But what separated the Surrealists from the past was a distrust of the concept of progress. The advent of the 20th century had brought the First World War and it was clear to them that progress boiled down mainly to increasingly impersonal means of killing and enslaving people. Patriotism had become a tool of generals and politicians to control and deceive great crowds–especially the poor and disenfrancised­–to hurl their bodies into bullets for their respective Motherlands. After the war, it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that the principles and rules that were cheered and encouraged by politicians and newspapers–who were often owned and controlled by the plutocrats–now threatened to crush the spiritual substance of humanity. At the simplest level, the machines that had been created to assist humanity had become their masters, and unthinking citizens adjusted their lives to the needs and schedules of the machines. Unlike what they saw as the positive developments of progress and technology–such as the telephone and the motor car–negative machinery, like societal conventions and the present economic situation, bent mankind to its needs.

It was now a very large world, larger than at any previous time in history. World War I created an intellectual and artistic internationalism, and there was a sudden and overpowering flow of anthropological, historical, and cultural information flooding into Paris as never before, from all times and places. The provincialism that Breton complained about was over forever. Society was in crisis at every level. Overnight, everything from politics to morality to even thought itself seemed open to choice and experiment. Events such as the 1917 Communist Revolution pointed to the growing disparity between the working class and the bourgeoisie, and that the present economic situation was basically a modern and obscured version of feudalism–and that common workingclass people could actually do something about it. Religious and metaphysical thought was paralyzed by scientific and psychological discoveries, which only led society toward a flourishing esoteric spiritualism. Reason and logic were no longer seen as objective but manipulated at the service of hidden agendas, and language itself became suspect. They decided that the only alternative to participating in the corrupting process of not being able to see through your own lies was not to speak at all; or if you had to, to speak illogically. Art seemed exhausted formally, first by photography and then by Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, and Abstraction, which had all proven to be deadends. Even poetry had become worn out and corrupt–a self-perpetuating lie machine. The Surrealists decided that a fundamental change from poetry’s current emphasis on the production of more “acceptable product” would only be cured and made pure again by moving the playing field to a poetry of gesture. For instance, it’s easy to pretend you’re angry or sublime in words–you might even convince yourself–but there’s no question of how you’re feeling when you put your fist through a window.

The other thing that separated the Surrealists from the past came to them via psychoanalysis and Freud’s concept of the unconscious. What was clear was that life was often the result of unconscious processes, and that our conscious understanding was only a stage show our egos created in order to obscure what was really going on. The bigger the liar, the more convincing the argument, the more logical their explanations. But whereas Freud insisted on the control of the id by the ego, the Surrealists saw the ego merely as the last curtain to be pulled aside. They wanted to be completely taken over by the unconscious and its hidden psychic system.

To uncover this hidden system, they began a daily practice of collecting evidence of unconscious invention, dreams, and trance states. They continued Freud’s experiments in free association and soon became convinced that this unconscious, unlocateable part of ourselves that we experienced every night via our dreams directly, but unconsciously, influenced and undermined–even determined in a very real way–everyday reality; and that we consciously rejected this reality every morning as we got out of bed and put on rational reality in the same way that we put on our clothes. They believed that waking and sleeping, the unconscious and dreams, that day and night were related to one another like two branches from the same trunk. They were convinced that psychic illnesses, such as hysteria, were actually “the greatest poetic achievements of the nineteenth century,” as a necessary, graphically visible rebellion of the unconscious against convention. They believed in order for humanity to be whole again it was imperative to reclaim what the demands of society had pushed aside. Their task was to revive and integrate these aspects. They believed that “the rational world was only relatively in tune with actual thought” and that “existence was elsewhere.”

Besides trance states and dream work, the Surrealists believed that the qualities that had been labeled feminine, childlike, and primitive had been suppressed in the unconscious for too long, and were actually much closer to the essence of creativity than control and power. Baudelaire had seen “woman as the being who cast the greatest shadow and the greatest light into dreams.” The female Surrealists were present in almost every poem, prose work, painting, and photograph. They were seen as the “Philosopher’s Stone”–the transformative agent–at once man’s most intimate, yet forever mysterious equal, able to reveal the poet’s best nature to themselves. True freedom was best expressed on the lover’s bed.

Likewise, they searched the art and culture of so-called primitive societies for insight, and Picasso, to his dying day, attempted to unlearn all of his education so that he might once again paint with the innocence of a child. In addition, they believed the concepts of individual genius and talent were a big scam, and that it was actually the unconscious, which belonged to everyone equally, that drove the pure creative act. In fact, the true creative act was the result of a failure of the conscious mind: the artist for whatever reason was temporarily or permanently unable to mediate reality, and this created a gap through which art poured, out of the conscious control of the artist.

From the beginning, the emphasis in Surrealist art was on completely spontaneous collaborative products, primarily as a means for overcoming the distinction between art and life. They insisted they no talent . . . that they had become undemanding registering apparati. They celebrated the art of the amateur. Everyone was to attempt everything: Breton, for example, wrote poetry, manifestoes, and novels, as well as created objects, made drawings and collages, painted, and worked with paper cut-outs.

In general, Surrealist art celebrated incongruous combinations, metamorphosis, and ambiguity. For the poet Pierre Reverdy: “The image was a pure creation of the mind. It could not be born from a comparison but only from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities was both distant and true, the stronger the image would be–the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.” For the poet Paul Eluard:

When there is a total fusion of the real image and the hallucination it has provoked, no misunderstanding is possible. The resemblance between the two objects is more from the subjective element contributing to establish it than the objective relationship that exists between them. The poet is the supremely hallucinated artist, the one who establishes resemblances consciously between the most dissimilar objects.

The Surrealists found that when they abandoned logic, the mind moved naturally from one phenomenon to the next, in a state of continuous surprise. By abandoning accepted appearances, they had learned to see the world, and their own lives, with new, passionately curious eyes.

For the Surrealists, what was truly beautiful was the life force moving through every one of us, and the physical manifestation of that beauty was energy, motion, and transformation. They set out to destroy the static art-museum concept of beauty as something other than life. For Breton “The marvelous is always beautiful; everything marvelous is beautiful; and only the marvelous is beautiful.”

As writers, the Surrealists were primarily interested creating works that freed words and images from rational and discursive order, substituting chance and indeterminacy for premeditation and deliberation, in order to achieve the logic and continuity of dreams. Writing that came from the conscious, rational mind was a lie.  Some poets, like Benjamin Peret, relied on automatic writing–which had been defined by the French psychologist Pierre Janet  in 1889 as letting the pen wander unconsciously and automatically on the page–and wrote from the heart or other organs. “The Magnetic Fields”–the first Surrealist prose work written in eight days by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault in 1919–was the result of just this sort of unconscious automatic writing. Surrealist novels were composed as the poets wandered through the streets of Paris without agenda, observing and being directed by apparently accidental encounters and suggestions, believing that everything outside of them was somehow echoed in their soul. They also explored writing performed under hypnosis and artificial sleep. Desnos was especially good at artificial sleep, being able to accomplish it even in public. Other poets, like Soupault, spent more time crafting their work.

They were also intrigued by the possibility of the transmigration of souls. If that were true, what they were calling the unconscious might actually be the part of us that we called the soul; or at least the part of us that was eternal­–and that perhaps not only could we contact it directly, but we could actually become it as well­–at once and forever.

These were not new ideas, even in France. The Symbolist Odilon Redon of the previous generation had written, “In art, nothing occurs by the will alone, and everything by the obedient submission to the unconscious which opens up below it.” But the Surrealists sought a destruction of the distinction between the dream state and waking. Soon Louis Aragon was writing in his journal: “We feel the whole power of images. We have lost the ability to direct them. We have become their kingdom, and we their servants.” But it was soon obvious to Breton and others that this loss of control also soon meant works that were often so subjective as to be incomprehensible. Breton began a series of theoretical works such as his Surrealist manifestoes, which were more philosophical than literary works. The most extreme of these was probably the second Surrealist manifesto of 1929, which openly declared war on civilization: “The movement’s main ambition is to produce a general & serious crisis of consciousness, both in the intellectual & in the moral realm”–”unconditional revolt, total disobedience, systematic sabotage.”

The first visual artist to inspire Breton and the other Surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico. One day Breton saw and bought de Chirico’s painting “The Child’s Brain” in a Paris art gallery. This painting inspired Ernst and others, who borrowed elements from it for their own paintings. But by 1919 de Chirico had already pulled away from the Surrealists and began a series of paintings based largely on classical and religious themes.

Man Ray was the quintessential Surrealist artist. Known primarily as a photographer, he also painted, created sculptures, rayographs, and collages.

By 1919, the artist Max Ernst began a series of collages using 19th century woodcuts, and even completed a collage novel in 1929 called “The Woman of 100 Heads.” He quickly discovered other means of non-retinal or passive painting, where the painting was not the result of the conscious creation of the artist but was as much created in the subjective visual experience of the viewer, like massive Rorschach tests. In addition, he worked out a series of semiautomatic processes that included room for accident and ambiguity. These also incorporated associative possibilities in the viewer where their intellect mixed with the intellect of the painter. In frottage an object is placed under the canvas and then rubbed to leave an impression. In grattage the image is created as randomly arranged paint is partially scraped away.

For Rene Magritte, art enabled the painter to create a secondary reality which did not exist other than inside the viewer’s mind: “the graphic description of a thought made visible.” He painted lyrical metaphors and gave them strange titles in order to give objects other, more suitable names. These were “dreams which sought to make one not sleep but wake.” More than any of the other Surrealist painters, Magritte sought to create in his paintings a conscious relationship to the unconscious.

Which brings us to perhaps the most famous of the Surrealist painters: Salvador Dali, who also found Surrealism too passive but for entirely different reasons. Dali was strongly influenced by Jacques Lacan’s “On Paranoia in Its Relation to the Personality,” and claimed to have developed a method to become mentally ill for a short period of time in order to induce delusions and states of frenzy. His paintings thus became dream photography: he believed “that the moment was near when a thought process of paranoiac, active character could, together with automatism and other passive conditions, raise confusion to a system that would totally discredit the real world.”

From the first, Dali’s interest in celebrity, social standing, personal wealth, commercial success, and his willingness to participate and succeed in bourgeois society, including Hollywood movies and fashion magazines, irritated Breton, who had him in mind when he wrote early in Dali’s career: “New figures, with unambiguously evil intentions, have set themselves in motion. One sees with dark joy that nothing occurs on their path other than themselves.”

But in their efforts to unite life and art, the thing that was most obviously unnecessary, and almost certainly even destructive, was the entire concept of thinking of yourself as an artist who created “works of art” in a space somehow separate from your moment-to-moment existence. They believed that what was considered art was not really art but rather artifice. For them, art existed primarily in idea and gesture, not in the creation of more objects, which by then had degenerated in their eyes into the sentimental creation of an unreal counterworld. According to Michael Benedikt, for the Surrealists “Every single poem by each poet was not only an aesthetic gesture, but also an action. Each was not only a testimony, but a reality. To read a Surrealist poem is to enter a territory–however modest in size­–of liberated space.” They believed in an art that was the combination of individual, subjective desires and the world, of the inner and exterior, of dreams and hard facts, in the resolution of the two states of dream and reality into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality. For poet Robert Desnos, “it was less a question of having accepted as real certain facts formerly considered illusory rather than of placing dreams and reality on the same plane without caring whether any of it is false or true.” Surrealism wasn’t an art movement interested in the dull production of more art objects, but rather in a way to live our lives–lives capable of great beauty, creativity, humor, and kindness. If this was lost, there was nothing worth winning. Art for the Surrealist was “a question of going back to the source of poetic imagination and, what is more, of remaining there.” Art was not something one accumulated around oneself in order to justify their existence, but rather fell naturally from what was most human and common in all of us, when we lived our lives with passion and great joy.