A CNN article by Cath Pound has proclaimed that 2024 will be the 100th anniversary of surrealism, as the surrealist movement can be said to have been launched by founder André Breton’s release of his “Surrealism Manifestos” in October of 1924.
My first favorite artistic style was Polynesian. But my first favorite artistic -ism as an articulated movement was surrealism. I now see its articulation by Breton’s manifesto as a milestone in a longer history, in which aspects of the ideas appeared earlier. Dadaism, for example. The idea was to resist the excessive control imagined upon thought and art by reason, turning to subconscious ideas and dream states. That sounded natural to me in the 1960s, coming under the influence of Donovan, etc. It was supposed to thereby resist war and oppression. I think it never really did, because wars can be fought while high. But it deserved an A for effort.
The movement is usually thought of as a movement in graphic arts, but it also had literary expressions. Kafka was writing a dozen years before 1924, and I think his writing certainly illustrates literary surrealism.
I originally fell in love with graphic surrealism. In high school, we all had to spend time imprisoned in non-classes called study periods. I got out of those simply by virtue of not being noisy and unruly, so the high school let me, as a reward, spend study periods in the school library. There I could read anything I wanted. I read math books and loads of coffee table art books with glossy plates, with tons of images of paintings by Dali, Picasso, Magritte, Breon, Miró, Paul Klee, etc.
I got a taste for the literary expressions of surrealism later in college, at the University of Washington.
One of the things I started to realize was that some of the best representatives of literary surrealism were in humor. Groucho Marx was as surrealistic as they come: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images,” showing a picture of a pipe with the words in French “this is not a pipe,” straddles the graphic and the literary and is a great joke. I was eventually inspired to do a photoshopped rip-off of that painting. Mine shows an electric drill, and the caption in French says, “This is not a drill.” I wanted it to be a viral meme, but it never took off.
I’d like to see my saying “A baby is nothing to sneeze at” be a viral meme. I think it’s my last hope.
The last time I was homeless, I came up with a Dada-esque performance piece that I was really proud of. I approached people during one day and asked them to buy the naming rights to various of my body parts, their choice, for a dollar apiece, unless it had already been claimed. I raked in twelve dollars. Enough for cheeseburgers and fries for two days.
The trouble with performance pieces is they’re all so ephemeral. If you’re lucky, it only lasts a week.
Getting back to the history of surrealism. I think you have to give psychoanalysis credit (Freud, Jung, etc.) for getting the ideas of the unconscious and the subconscious mind(s) talked about and drawing attention to dreams at all. I also think Lewis Carroll deserves a lot of credit, and he should have won a posthumous award for his groundbreaking contributions in the area. “Q. How is a raven like a writing desk? A. Poe wrote on one of each.” The man may very well have been doing drugs. Poe himself is another good candidate. HP Lovecraft must have been blitzed out of his mind.
You know who was probably never high? Plato. He tells us there is a perfect, absolute and eternal Form of a wet dog. Because you can conceive of a wet dog. So it has an ideal Form, in Platonic ideal Form space, with all the other ideal Forms. Plato wanted to do away with poets. Of course. Poets have no place in an ideal state. They keep bringing up abominations like wet dogs.
I don’t care that surrealism never ended wars or oppression. I’m happy that it leaves room for poetry and wet dogs.
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
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