The Surreal World

Horse women equal maternal river monsters. Flaming giraffe equals masculine apocalyptic monster. Cat angel equals divine heterosexual monster. Hourglass equals metaphysical monster. Gala and Dalí equal sentimental monster. The little blue dog is not a true monster.

~ Salvdore Dali

Much more than Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Expressionism, and all forms of pure abstraction and even the often misunderstood Romanticism and Impressionism, Surrealism is the one modern art movement that still has legs. It is not even that artists still make work that can be authentically called Surrealist, it is that so many other things that are called Surreal or inspired by Surrealism seem to be everywhere in the post-You-Name-It period we are in, and have been in, for quite some time.

Pop Art has almost had as remarkable a run as Surrealism, but the ethics of appropriation are now in question and Pop Art appears to have been nothing more than a stylistic twist based on older Surrealist strategies of alienation. Even as Surrealism became a commonplace brand for cliché melting clocks, it has continued to grow far past the ridiculous Dali and the sophomoric Magritte to inspire new iterations and manifestations throughout contemporary art. No other modernist art movement has had such worldwide appeal.

What can we make of Surrealism today, its strange persistence, its infectious way of disrupting the familiar and the well-known? What is it at its root that continues to make it quintessentially contemporary, even as all other modernisms have become irrelevant or redundant?

The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel

Surrealism became pervasive in part because it was able to effectively look back into the ancient past and find all kinds of perplexing and fantastical images that could now be called "surreal." From masks from the South Pacific Islanders, to the dream-like illustrations in alchemical texts, to the moral mashups of Heironymous Bosch, to the 19th C. illustrations of J. J. Grandville, there was much in the art world from many different places and times that could be convincingly called surreal. In this way Surrealism found a spiritual kinship with art of the past which feels substantially different from how the impressionists were excited by Japanese Art and the Cubists were drawn to African Sculpture. In these and other instances what the modern artists took away from these visual cultures had little or no connection to the original context or meaning and instead was a pastiche of foreign optics. But the Surrealist impulse was to disorient, confuse and subvert rational categories through chance and intuition. Rather than appropriate the outward appearance of other artistic traditions the surrealists found ways to mimic irrational artistic processes.

Perhaps the question is not how Surrealism changed art but rather how it tapped into something much older and stranger than Surrealism itself. The idea of the grotesque and the human-animal mash-ups of parody and caricature is quite old but even these are but the trappings of an older idea that Victor Turner called the liminal which is characterized as a temporary space apart from the structures of society where the symbols and ideas of society are set down and we enter into a time of ambiguity and paradox. These strange insensible images are intended to break with custom and enter into speculation about the parts of things. Turner writes,

"Monsters startle the neophytes into thinking about objects, persons, relationships and features of their environment they have hitherto taken for granted" (105)

The success of Surrealism is not in its ability to change the way we think about the world but in giving a modern name to a foundational idea that has manifested itself in every human culture across time and space.

Simply, it shows itself [elle se montre]-that is what the word monster means—it shows itself in something that is not yet shown and therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure.

~ Jacques Derrida