The Brooklyn Rail

One could be forgiven for thinking that Surrealism was an early twentieth-century artistic movement, one of the more well-known strands of Modernism, which boasted figures like André Breton and Salvador Dalí but also famous associates like Picasso. According to their own self-understanding (and to the popular imaginary), the art of the Surrealists plumbed the human psyche in order to retrieve the traces of unconscious experience. Techniques like l’écriture automatique [automatic writing] allowed the repressed, innermost self to become manifest; Breton referred to this “unencumbered” mode of self-expression as “spoken thought,” since it cut out the conceptual intermediary between language and the unconscious. The indelible record of this view of the movement is perhaps the anecdote according to which Jacques Lacan commissioned his stepbrother, the Surrealist André Masson, to produce a masking panel for a recent acquisition, Courbet’s scandalous portrait of a vulva, L’Origine du monde (1866). The resulting painting was Terre érotique (1955), in which Courbet’s allegorical subject matter (the origin of the world) becomes the literal content of the painting. Surrealist abstraction brings the latent content—the desire for the real mother, always hidden from view—to the fore. Later Surrealist films, like Buñuel’s Cet obscur objet du désir [That Obscure Object of Desire] (1977), performed and reinforced this understanding of the movement.

Yet Surrealism was not an artistic movement so much as it was a protest against the idea of the artwork as idle “cultural treasure,” an inert monument to civility. Surrealism in the twenties always amounted to more than the official statements about it and its pale imitations from the postmodern period. Breton’s well-known psychoanalytic framing was supposed to register the nature of Surrealism as a praxis of defamiliarization and disruption; it is this middlebrow pseudo-Freudianism that limps on in A24 films and in the work of directors like Yorgos Lanthimos. Meanwhile, the true and forgotten significance of the movement lay elsewhere. What is perhaps most surreal now in Surrealism, in its centenary, is that it was in effect a Communist art movement, which—in the words of Walter Benjamin—aimed “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution.”

One of the grim ironies of art history is the success story of Surrealism. The legacy of the movement (and of Dada) is that its dream of abolishing the artwork and of freeing artists from sclerotic, institutionalized forms has come true. One need only attend an information art exhibit to see just how spectacularly successful the Surrealist program has been in this respect. The anti-artistic dimension of modernist art has perhaps been its most enduring contribution to contemporary art, for better or worse.

Yet the other legacy of Surrealism, inseparable from the first, lies in the way that it nevertheless realized its anarchist, anti-art tendencies in works of art. Both the Dadaists and the Surrealists sought to dissolve art into life, but the Surrealists also aimed to bring to life the “revolutionary energies” stored in everyday, outmoded objects, from derelict factories to abandoned toys. The Surrealist emphasis on “shock” outstripped its psychoanalytic origins and—as in Masson’s later turn toward abstraction—was reintegrated as an anti-representational, modernist technique. Their opposition to art and to the art market ultimately still assumed the form of art, meaning that the Surrealists perhaps in spite of themselves secretly disciplined their anarchistic pursuit of freedom to the demands of art after all.

The idea of artists laboring not just in living memory of, but under the same sky as, a worldwide workers’ movement is, today, surreal. And yet it is this aspect of Surrealism that remains now most widely forgotten and obscure. In her brilliant, if now dated, French theoretical reflections on Man Ray’s photography (references to structuralism as “traditional linguistics” abound), Rosalind Krauss locates photomontage as the essence of Surrealist artistic production, to the extent that it ruptures “the continuous fabric of reality” and induces an “experience of nature as representation, physical matter as writing.” What these heady remarks mean to suggest is that “automatic writing” was always better understood not as a technique for revealing archetypal unconscious desires, but as a way of manifesting the autonomous character of human mindedness. Reality itself is not just a brute material fact, but is a result of our own cognitive and practical activity.

If, as Krauss memorably puts it, “surreality is nature convulsed into a kind of writing,” it also matters what is written and who is doing the writing. Surrealism aimed to help us to see that we are the ones who have carved reality up into factories and landscapes, suburbia and great metropoles, redlined zip-codes and gerrymandered voting districts. And we have made ourselves into capitalists and proletariats, financiers and wage slaves, tech workers and the working poor. Benjamin once described Surrealism evocatively as the attempt to substitute for the “play of human features” the “face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.” If this image somehow continues to shock, it means that Surrealism at one hundred is not yet quite dead—that its distinctly revolutionary beauty still retains the power to convulse.