ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
XVIII. CLASSICAL SURREALISM
Surrealism started out as an antidote to the bourgeois genres; early Surrealists sought a solution to the problem of how to add realistic content to progressive form for a language that's forward-looking in style and content. The middle-class opportunism of most artists of the time allowed Salvador Dali and others to lead a split within the movement. "Social" Surrealism continued to fight for a new language and a new world, while "Classical" Surrealism devolved, under Salvador Dali's leadership, to became a mechanical juxtaposition of a decorative, 'wacky', exoticised form of realism trucked out with a sterile and obscurantist Freudianism.
Classical Surrealism takes the petty-bourgeoisie genres as its subject-source for imagery and juggles them in a psychoanalytic vegamatic, de-emphasizing social references. The brilliantly talented, politically challenged, self-proclaimed genius Salvador Dali wrote in his autobiography about the film "Un Chien Anadalou," which he co-created with Luis Bunuel, "Our film ruined in a single evening ten years of pseudo-intellectual post-war advance guardism...the foul thing which is figuratively called abstract art fell at our feet, wounded to death, never to rise again, after having seen a girl's eye cut by a razor blade." Bunuel also wrote about the film, albeit in a more explanatory mode, "In the working out of the plot every idea of a rational, aesthetic or other technical matters was rejected as irrelevant...The plot is the result of a conscious psychic automatism...it should be noted that when an image or idea appeared from the collaborators discarded it immediately if it was derived from remembrance, or from their cultural pattern, or if, simply, it had conscious association with another idea...The motivation of the images was, or was meant to be purely irrational...nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psycho-analysis."
There are two points to note:
1. Classical Surrealism offers a method, psychic automatism (similar to what we call "stream of consciousness"), which opposed the academic, overly predictable and consciously controlled methodology of bourgeois realism.
2. The Classical Surrealists also claimed to opposed the visual language of Bourgeois Realism, namely metaphor, symbolism, iconography and representation. No cultural or personal connotations are allowed.
Both of these goals cannot have been fully realized without a complete emptying-out of the effect of surrealist art on the viewer, and in fact they are a smoke screen, an attempt to disguise the still-intimate, although secretive, connections between Classical Surrealism and Bourgeois Realism. Classical Surrealism is in some ways the artsy mistress of Bourgeois Realism rather than a revolutionary progeny. It uses irrational juxtapositions to undercut the reality of the image, making a decorative surrealism safe for collectors. In contrast, Social Surrealism uses the same techniques of exaggeration and artifice to amplify the reality-base of the image or story. For the early Surrealists, the attempt to de-louse familiar forms from petty bourgeois shallowness ironically created an idealization of emptiness, of irrationality, which was an attempt to supersede the stultification of realism and its 'passive reflection' methodology. However, in an artwork, even a so-called "abstraction", no image can be devoid of "content," regardless of what the artist wishes, because the audience brings with it a certain set of socially defined connotations which are beyond the will of the artist. It is, therefore, the task of the artist to recognize and understand these socially defined connotations as a pre-condition for dialectically superseding them and bringing the viewer to a higher level of consciousness. The misconception of certain early Surrealists is based on the notion that the audience brings nothing to the viewing, and that the process of absorption of the artwork is mechanical and passive. Many of the first-generation Surrealists replace the passive image of realism with a passive viewer.
The dialectic of art is complex, and I am one of many who believe that Luis Bunuel at his most inspired (Exterminating Angel, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) superceded most of the ideological limitations which he created for himself and explored the Stygian caves of Social Surrealist psycho-social theater at will, fully and benignly oblivious to his own surface ideology, making inspired masterpieces for himself and the world.