Welcome back to my blog! Can you believe how quickly 2022 flew by? Starting 2023 feels surreal! So, let’s talk surrealism since I refuse to believe that time flows by as quickly as it does.
If you are familiar with surrealist art then you may know surrealist artists like Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Renee Magritte, Man Ray, and so on but for those who don’t know, surrealism was a movement of the early 20th century in which artists sought to portray the subconscious based on Sigmund Freuds dream studies and psychological theories. Artists often created vivid imagery evoking unbridled emotions while tossing aside traditional imagery and structure much like Dadaism sought to do previously.
A film by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali titled Un Chien Andalou is one such Freudian art film that is a perfect example of surrealism in motion, though both director and artist claim there is no deeper meaning behind the work. The film depicts an opening scene in which a husband stands behind a somber wife and slices one of her eyes with a straight razor, produced by using a dead calf’s eyeball so no real bodily harm occurred. Right off the bat if you are not into intense imagery, don’t watch the film! It distorts time and reality with graphic imagery that fuses the mundane with the macabre with visuals such as ants crawling from a hole in a person’s hand, hair replacing the mouth of a woman, pianos, priests, dead donkeys, stone tablets with the Ten Commandments pulled forth by ropes, and a wooden box passed from one character to another. The film was created through discussions that Bunuel and Dali had about their dreams and through automatic writing, and at one point discussed the possibility of using human corpses covered in flies. However, their budget would not allow them to, so they did not pursue it. The film, they believed, would cause outrage, and would ultimately be poorly received. Much to their surprise, the film caused intrigue and became a sort of cult classic which led to Bunuel and Dali being formally invited into the surrealists.
From performative works like Un Chien Andalou came another nonsensical performance art called “Happenings.” Emerging from elements of surrealism and dada, happenings focused on the artists and participants of the happening. One famous happening organized by Allan Kaprow titled “Women licking jam off a car” from his happening series “Household,” was exactly what it sounds like. A performative piece in which women literally licked jam from a car. Out of place and unsettling, happenings delve into the nonsensical but also the mundane. Whether delving into the subconscious or wanting to experience the nonsensical dive into surrealism and its offshoots to start the new year right!
