SURREALISM IN ART Page: 8
|
Surrealism in Art:
|
|
The basic experience of the surrealists consists in the discovery of a "second reality," which, although it is inseparably fused with ordinary, empirical reality, is nevertheless so different from it that we are only able to make negative statements about it and to point to the gaps and cavities in our experience as evidence for its existence. Nowhere is this dualism expressed more acutely than in the works of Kafka and Joyce, who, although they have nothing to do with surrealism as a doctrine, are surrealists in the wider sense, like most of the progressive artists of the century. It is also this experience of the double-sidedness of existence, with its home in two different spheres, which makes the surrealists aware of the peculiarity of dreams and induces them to recognize in the mixed reality of dreams their own stylistic ideal. The dream becomes the paradigm of the whole world-picture, in which reality and unreality, logic and fantasy, the banality and sublimation of existence, form an indissoluble and inexplicable unity. The meticulous naturalism of the details and the arbitrary combination of their relationships which surrealism copies from the dream, not only express the feeling that we live on two different levels, in two different spheres, but also that these regions of being penetrate one another so thoroughly that the one can neither be subordinated to4 nor set against the other as its antithesis.
The dualism of being is certainly no new conception, and the idea of the "coincidentia oppositorum" is quite familiar to us from the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno, but the double meaning and the duplicity of existence, the snare and the seduction for the human understanding which lie hidden in every single phenomenon of reality, had never been experienced so intensively as now. Only mannerism had seen the contrast between the concrete and the abstract, the sensual and the spiritual, dreaming and waking in a similarly glaring light. The emphasis which modern art lays not so much on the coincidence of the opposites themselves, as on the fancifulness of this coincidence, is also reminiscent of mannerism. The sharp contrast, in the work of Dali, between the photographically faithful reproduction of the details and the wild disorder of their grouping corresponds, on a very humble level, to the fondness for paradox in the Elizabethan drama and the lyric poetry of the "metaphysical poets" of the seventeenth century. But the difference of level between the style of Kafka and Joyce, in which a sober and often trivial prose is combined with the most fragile transparency of ideas, and that of the manneristic poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is no longer so great. In both cases the real subject of the representation is the absurdity of life, which seems all the more surprising and shocking the more realistic the elements of the fantastic whole are. The sewing machine and the umbrella on the dissecting table, the donkey's corpse on the piano or the naked woman's body which opens like a chest of drawers, in brief, all the forms of juxtaposition and simultaneity into which the non-simultaneous and the incompatible are pressed, are only the expression of a desire to bring unity and coherence, certainly in a very paradoxical way, into the atomized world in which we live. Art is seized by a real mania for totality. It seems possible to bring everything into relationship with everything else, everything seems to include within itself the law of the whole. The disparagement of man, the so-called "dehumanization" of art, is connected above all with this feeling. In a world in which everything is significant or of equal significance, man loses his pre-eminence and psychology its authority.
|