AHIS BC 3626y Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Avant-Garde, Abstract Impressionism, Proletariat
25 Aug 2016
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February 2, 2016
Abstract Impressionism: Surrealism
Introduction:
• Soviet Avante Garde was a focus on necessity and utilitarianism while expanding the
audience to the proletariat
o This tilted them in the direction of propaganda
• Surrealism by contrast was focusing on a very peculiar notion of communication
• This communication was very different that seemed to run against the grain in what
was defined as social communication while also paradoxically expanding it
• Surrealists focus on the unconscious in which a resistance of order is possible
• This adds to the complexity of the project because while surrealism associates itself
with the teachings of Sigmund Freud as the immediate reactions to Freud
translations
Contradiction:
• while on the one hand surrealism reflects Freud, it at the same time finds the need
to describe the subconscious in everyday with Marxist critique
• this dichotomy in the focus on individual subjectivity (Freud) and in models of a
radical transformation of the collective (Marxism) is what defines surrealism
• Marxist theory had no room for a discussion of the individual
• Marxist orthodoxy prosecuted psychoanalysis which was illegal in the Soviet Union
• Freud publishes the Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 purposely to mark the shift
into a new realm of study
History of the Movement
• Andre Breton started the surrealist movement after reading Freud’s writing in Paris
o Freud told him that you cannot use reason to image surrealism and told him
that Breton didn’t understand what the unconscious was
o Freud dismisses the Surrealist project
• The typical artistic operation is not only the appropriation of previously existing
theories and models but also to transform them—often this transformation is without
the conscious knowledge of the artist
• Most new movements come from a stumble into something new, an accident.
• Surrealism wants to achieve an artistic production that foregrounds the irrational
those that aren’t premeditated
o This dismisses the proposition that the artist is a genius or special or creative
• The manifesto defines surrealism as psychic atomism in its purest state
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