"What is Surrealism?"

What is Surrealism? Is it a mythology?, Is it a dream?, or Is it just the fairy-tale of artistic creativity?

To find out, you might want to ask one the most well known surrealists in history: Max Ernst.

In an article for an exhibition by the same name ('Was ist Surrealismus?') written in Zurich, during October-November 1934, he tries to explain. He writes:

As a viewer like anyone else, the 'author' can witness the emergence of the work, follow the unfolding phases of its development with indifference or passion. Just as the poet listens to the automatic processes of thought and jots down their results, so too the painter projects what his optical inspiration suggests to him directly onto paper and canvas.

As we all know, every 'normal' person, and not just the artist, possesses an inexhaustible store of buried images within the unconscious. All that is required is courage and a liberating method (like automatic writing), a voyage of discovery into the unconscious that will unearth found objects in an unfalsified state (uncontaminated by conscious control). The concatenation of these objects can be interpreted as a kind of irrational knowledge or poetic objectivity in accordance with Paul Eluard's definition: 'Poetic Objectivity is nothing but the concatenation of all subjective elements of which the poet is temporarily the slave, and not the master.' It follows from this that the 'artist' simply falsifies matters.

Automatic writing, as well as, other similar methods are adequate for their own techniques of potential expression and can ensure the required poetic objectivity, i.e. the exclusion of reason, taste, and conscious intention from the productive process of the work of art.

Theoretical process, however could not assist them here, but only practical experiments (those known as Cadavre exquis ['Exquisite Corpse'] for example) have proved the feasibility of this approach. It transpired that the more arbitrary the conjunction of elements was, the more surely and ineluctably the ensuing spark of poetic inspiration was capable of effecting a partial or total transformation of things.

The delight we feel in every such successful metamorphosis derives not from the wretched aesthetic desire for distraction, but from an ancient and vital need of the intellect: for liberation from the tedious and deceiving paradise of hardened memories and for the exploration of a new and infinitely broader realm of experience.

If the surrealists are widely recalled as painters of a constantly mutating dream world, this should not imply that they reproduce their dreams in painting (this would simply be a descriptive and naive realism), or that each artist uses the elements of dreams to construct a little private world in which to play out some benevolent or malevolent role (this would simply be a 'fight from the time'). It means rather that these artists move freely, boldly and confidently at the borderline between the inner and the outer world, a borderline that is physically and psychologically entirely real ('surreal') even if it has not yet been adequately defined and determined, that they undertake to register precisely what they see and experience there, and that they intervene wherever their revolutionary instincts suggest they should.

So, finally...

What is Surrealism? Any attempt to answer this question with a definition will inevitably be disappointed until such time at the movement has come to a decisive end.

All I can do now is refer the reader to A. Breton's 'Surrealist Manifestos' and 'Les Vases communicants'. The fact that contradictions appear, and continue to reappear, within the changing positions successfully adopted by the Surrealists proves only that the movement is properly in flux. 

By overthrowing the established relationships between what counted as 'realities', Surrealism has thus inevitably played its part in accelerating the general crisis in the consciousness and conscience of our time.

*Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul

"Max Ernst (1891-1976)- What is Surrealism?" Art in Theory 1900-     2000. Malden, MA: 

Blackwell Publishing, 1993 (page 491-493).