bosetr.blogg.se - Surrealism warped reality

Painting becomes increasingly abstract or surreal, visible reality loses its meaning. Expressionism had already represented a radical break with the theory and practice of art that had dominated until that period. In the period between the world wars there took rise a felt need among artists to break with the bourgeoisie, and the traditional habits of seeing and living. In the end, surrealism attests to a desire to unite art and modernist trends like psychoanalysis into a new social outlook unafraid of the repressed, of fantasy.

The emergence of psychoanalysis after Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung was decisive for this trend. The effect that this creates comes not so much through crude association as through juxtaposition: the uncanny placement of objects. The specific novelty of surrealism in these cases arises in connection with the unreal, the dream world, or the uncanny, which creeps into pictures and collages. Surrealist photography, likewise, depicts reality. Realism is thus characteristic of the technique of surrealist painting. In painting, surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí often choose to work with the figurative, depicting the human body and other objects with traditional representational methods. The central themes and motifs of surrealist paintings, prints, and photographs are the dreamlike, the unconscious, fantasy, the unreal and the psyche. Surreal means "beyond reality", following from the French preposition sur, meaning "over", or "above". The term surrealism was first used by the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire around 1917, and was later coined by André Breton as the name of the surrealist movement. Surrealism developed parallel to the Dada movement, and followed closely on the rise of Expressionism.

Marina Rosenfeld: Mise en scene en scene #1 (Daily Bul, etc.The development and characteristics of surrealism.

Kenneth Goldsmith: Robert Desnos, “Awakenings” and “Ideal Mistress” (3:21): MP3.

Kenneth Goldsmith: Andre Breton, from “Manifesto of Surrealism” (2:35): MP3.

Kenneth Goldsmith: Hans Bellmar, from “What Oozed Through the Staircase” (1:48): MP3.

All this is now available at a special PennSound page. I also made a video recording of the final performance - a surrealist game. Surprised that the event wasn't being recorded, I brought out my smart phone and captured the audio as best I could from the fourth row. The event was called “What Oozed Through the Staircase: A Winter Afternoon of Surrealist Writing and Music,” held in the middle of the surrealist exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Sunday, January 26, 2014. I have folders where images and landscapes wait for me to find a use for them. I have books on magic and mysteries of the world and Jane Fonda’s workout routine and children’s illustrated history books and books about space and land and science.

There is something peaceful about cutting along the edge of an image. I cut and glue pictures and patterns instead. I’ll be in no mood for words or for thinking with any depth on a matter. Sometimes writing poems is too much for me. There are no painstaking decisions to make or moments where I completely shut down and question every decision I ever made leading up to this point. I can follow my amateur (nonexistent) visual sensibilities as I piece together the cut-out phrases and headless bodies and mollusk shells, and it brings me simple pleasure.