The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Salvador Dali
The Treachery of Images 1928–29, Magritte
Project 3: Surrealism
Three essential points on Surrealism
1.
2.
3.
Concept
Andre Breton defined Surrealism as : Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to
express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of
thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason,
outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.
Surrealism is closely tied to revolutionary ideologies. It regards excessive rationalism,
conventional value, order and arrangement of life as too managed, limiting, or even
repressive to the potential of human creatively.
Hence, it advocates the exploration of the unconsciousness, especially as it is manifested
in dreams. In dreams, the Surrealists discover a resource of power that is not
censored by the rational mind where the order of elements are often arranged or
linked in surprising, liberating ways.
Dreams often do not make sense in the conventional sense. However, dreams are often
strongly felt. The elements in a dream, free from their conventional role in conscious life,
can be linked freely with other elements to create powerful and unsettling sensations.
It is the imagery, the quality of the imagery (how you paint them) and the mechanism of
dream (How the imagery is arranged and expressed in unconventional ways) that we will
explore in this project.
Subject Matter and Execution
The subject of this project is your dream(s). You will use the elements in a dream to
creatively construct a new painting. The painting will be a powerful arrangement of
different dream images and application of painting techniques that suggest multiple openended narratives.
Use Freud’s analysis of the mechanism of dream (the dreamwork), especially the concepts
of condensation and displacement to guide you.
The Dreamwork
According to Freud, there are two essential operations of dream to bypass the censorship of the conscious
mind. They are called condensation, and displacement. These operations can guide you to invent creative
ways to organize and execute the imageries in your painting.
Condensation
Condensation is brought about by latent elements that have something in common being combined and fused
into a single unity in the manifest dream. Freud points out that the process is like constructing a new
concept out of something that various people, things and places have in common. The new temporary
concept has this common element as its nucleus. It is like a creation of the imagination that can combine
things that do not normally belong together into a strange new unity. Freud says that the “creative”
imagination cannot invent anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another. The
dream work puts thoughts (“which may be objectionable and unacceptable, but which are correctly
constructed and expressed”) into another form. But he contrasts condensation (“this rendering into another
script or language”) to translation in the following way:
The dream work tries to condense two (or more) different thoughts by seeking out an ambiguous
word/images in which the two thoughts may come together.
Displacement
“Dream-censorship only gains its end if it succeeds in making it impossible to find the path back from the
allusion to the genuine thing.”
Displacement refers to the fact that an idea’s emphasis, or its interest, or its intensity, is liable to be detached
from it and to be passed on to other ideas, which were originally of little intensity but which are related to
the first idea by a chain of associations. The energy runs along pathways allowed by censorship.
We do not need a similarity of subject matter to make the kind of allusion that displacements
follow. Allusions replace the original idea by unusual external associations such as similarity of sound,
verbal ambiguity, and so on.
The allusions used in displacements are connected with the elements they replace by the most external and
remote relations and are therefore not always intelligible as such.
Process
In this project you will create a series of four studies (part 1) and a painting (part2) based
on your dream(s).
Part 1
Each student will create 4 studies with color (any medium and material) in the concept
book. These are concept drawings for your painting. These drawings need to be
developed to the point that the professor can have a good sense of the final painting.
Use one of your dreams or a combination of several dreams as a point of departure. Take
note of the elements in your dreams (ice-cream, mermaid, Tom Cruise, etc). Make an
inventory of the elements. Combine and arrange them (using Freud’s idea of condensation
and displacement) to create surprising connections and flows for your final painting.
Part 2
Each student will create a painting on canvas no smaller that 3x4 feet. Use different
painting techniques (washes, realism, gestural, abstract) to express your imagery. The
choice of imagery, their relationship and the way they are painted are the key to create an
evocative, and mysterious scenario(s) that invites suspense and multiple readings.
Sweet dreams….