5 aspects of surreal art
20/2/17 lecture by Ali Standing
Automatism
In brief, automatism is where a surrealist artist creates artwork without thinking of what they are drawing. These drawings are created by the artist just moving their hand around across the paper. The below example of “automatic drawing” was created by André Masson in 1924. Masson developed the technique in the 1920’s and it is themed on Freud’s idea of free association.
There is a game that we played as children called “exquisite corpses”. We played at the start of the lecture that is another example of automatic drawing. The idea is that you create a character with different people drawing different sections of the figure. Once someone has drawn the head, they fold the page and hand it to the next person who draws the body. Having being passed around the group there will be a picture of a character which is said to be “automatically” drawn.
Eroticism
The human body as always been an interesting subject for artist and for surrealists, they had a particular interest in the highly eroticised female body. Unlike other artist looking at the human form, surrealists scrutinised the body by dismembering, desecrating, and eroticising them.
In Salvador Dali’s painting, The Great Masturbator (1929), you can see the distorted female form which is said to embody his sexual deviancy and his fear of locusts.
The Uncanny
Most surrealist work has an unsettling aesthetic that looks strange and unnatural. The uncanny is a Freudian term that refers to the feeling of discomfort from looking at something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
The first example “Photography” created by Elliot Earls in 2008 is basically depicting a disfigured body. This uncanny look gives us that unsettling feeling that the Freudian term describes.
The uncanny has also made its way into contemporary advertisement as seen in this 2014 anti-smoking campaign. This advert is particularly dark as it’s meant to provoke disgust as well as an unsettling feeling.
Metamorphosis
This is where one or more changes to something can create an unsettling feeling. An example of this is the rotting flesh instead of tobacco from the anti-smoking advert or the fur cup created by Meret Oppenheim in 1936.
The Surreal Landscape
Before surrealism, landscape painting had changed dramatically with artist creating work with fictional colours and experimental processes. Surrealism took this further by creating landscapes that depicted a human’s subconscious mind. They often featured interesting and distorted objects like Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931).
These five aspects made up surreal artwork in the early 20th century but they still play a large role in today’s culture. From video games to guerrilla advertisement, creators still use this art movement as inspiration.
