Surrealism

Surrealism is a genre of art that has always interested me starting with the learning of Dali, Brenton and the Surrealist Manifesto in schooling. The idea of tapping the unconscious and expressing it through art has proven to produce pretty remarkable works. Freud then gets his input on the genre, and publishes his works and ideals of life, death, sex, fears and the subconscious mind, which is quickly adapted to Surrealism. The bizarre dream like picture and paintings are like none other, depicting illusions and commonplace items altogether. It doesn’t take a stretch of imagination to say that drug use as well was an outlet that many artists approached the movement. I was surprised in the readings that drug use wasn’t mentioned much or at all in a movement so heavily based on self-reflexivity, the body/mind, and the subconscious. The one aspect of Surrealism that I was unaware of is the influence on women during the movement. It was said to be mainly a male-dominated movement where women were portrayed through stereotypes and symbols. Many of the work described as ‘phallic’ and made with the ‘attitude’ of men, were not only noticed by women artists but expressed through their own work. Personally I feel actual phallic representation like in the work Compulsion Furniture by Yayoi Kusama is a little overdone and overt. I enjoyed a lot of Francesca Woodman’s work with mirrors in her photography. I find the use of mirrors fascinating and incorporate it in my films as well, I think it is put best by Posner with “The mirror that traditionally reveals becomes…a barrier to conceal or deflect identity. “ I’ve always seen a mirror as a parallel universe that has its own form of expression, with their own story to tell. It perplexes me that Kusama, Mendieta, and Woodman all died at such young ages perhaps because of deep affiliation of their artworks and the emotion that it carries. Again it is interesting to see how women have a hand on this movement that is noted to be a male dominated genre.