Surrealism

Surrealism was an avant-garde art movement that originated in Paris in the 1920s. The key year was 1924, which saw the first issue of the review La Révolution Surréaliste, as well as the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and most famously of all, André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. The movement had international ambitions and soon spread across Europe to the Americas (Latin America, the Caribbean, as well as the United States and Canada) and to parts of Asia (particularly Japan). As is clear from Breton's manifesto, surrealism sought to radically reduce the involvement of the rational, conscious mind in the making of art. Surrealist art often included an irrational juxtaposition of elements: elements that, although perfectly ordinary on their own, together produced unsettling affects. One of the most vivid examples of surrealism is Meret Oppenheim's Object (1936)—a cup, saucer, and spoon that have been covered in fur. As the two elements (crockery and fur) meet, the utility of the object has been destroyed, while the sexual aspects of both have been brought to the surface.

For surrealists, dreams were seen as offering a greater (and better) reality than the routine world of bourgeois propriety and business profiteering and state-sponsored nation building. If dreams were not always available, then dream-like conditions could be fostered through games, drunkenness, and other forms of intoxication, “automatic” writing and drawing, random instructions, and so on. Although Freudian psychoanalysis was an important resource for surrealists, it should be remembered that Freud remained deeply skeptical about the value of surrealism. In its turn, surrealism might also remind us that the goals of psychoanalysis are often normative in outlook and aim, whereas the ambition of surrealism was to unleash the power of the nonrational in the name of a revolution of everyday life.

Although the connections between surrealism and consumer culture may not seem obvious, it is worth noting that the word surreal quickly entered everyday vocabulary to denote strange coincidences, bizarre juxtapositions, and a general sense of the uncanny. This had less to do with the success of this avant-garde art movement and much more to do with the way that surreal values and practices were deployed in the fields of advertising and commercial culture more generally. In a promotional world where breakfast cereals are seen to jump around kitchens and young women shampoo their hair in tropical rainforests, a certain aspect of surrealism has been harnessed to the interests of consumer society. Although this can be seen as simply commercial culture appropriating avant-garde culture to its own ends, the synergies between consumer culture and surrealism are much more profound. In the first volume of Capital (1867), Karl Marx drew our attention to the form of the commodity through the example of a table. His argument is that a table is an ordinary sensual object, but once it becomes a commodity it enters a world of illusion and starts dancing and has fantastic ideas sprouting from its wooden brain. Whereas this is an allegory of commodification, one only has to pick up any furniture catalogue to get a sense of the fantasies that commodity culture promises and to get a sense of the ubiquity of the commodity's dreamworlds.

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