ARTS112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Christ Child, Aestheticism, Ower
Katherine Paterson
ARTS112 Arts & Design History & Theory
Week 10
Surrealism
-Surreal > strange, distortion of reality, unlock the subconscious, children dream
-During dream time has the highest electrical activity and is a time used to release our
deep thoughts and fears
-How are we repressed? Laws and ethics, societal conformity
-Middle class bourgeois - defined by customs, laws, manners
-Emerged from Dada in Paris, early 1920s, led by Andre Breton (not anti-art
movement)
-Andre Breton published a manifesto in 1924 which was about freedom from social
conventions, religious doctrine, state authority and capitalism. Freeing the mind and
body to be creative and liberated. "Freedom, the importance of the imagination and
emotions/irrationality"
-Early Surrealism influenced by:
-Writings of Karl Marx (left-wing and pro-working)
-Writings of Sigmud Freud (sexuality, desire, dreams, unconscious, psychoanalysis)
-Carl Jung (Primitivism, symbols and dreams)
-Non-western arts and culture (trying to move away from the conventional)
-Surrealist Interests:
-Dreams, the unconscious, desire and imagination 0 to revisit instrumental rationality
(dreams are opposite to reason)
-That everyday life is/should be art. Dont walk through life not noticing things
-Chance, spontaneity, surprise, juxtaposition, chaos and curiosity
-To shock and disrupt middle class safe conventions and perceptions - get people to
think and see thinks differently "convulsive beauty" - being overwhelmed by
something you were passionately involved with
-To introduce the assured, explore play and fun - Exquisite corpse and other
collaborative games, pass notes, Lewis Carol's Alice in Wonderland (different world,
talking animals, clash of realities) influenced/referenced in their artworks
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