The Creative Potential Of The Subconscious: The Conceptual Framework Of Surrealism
By Emily James. For Art History 331: Framing the Viewer: 20th Century Art. Grade: A+, 90%.
Against the chaos and destruction of warfare in the 20th century, a new artistic movement based on the amalgamation of dream and reality flourished. Salvador Dali and Meret Oppenheim were among the pioneering artists who established the main surrealist concepts. The assisted readymades of Dali’s Lobster Telephone (1936) and Oppenheim’s Pelzhandschuhe (1936), involved concepts of revolution and the uncanny, while paintings including Dali’s Great Masturbator (1929) and Oppenheim’s Steinfrau (1938) deployed the fragmented psyche and automatism. In their artistic exploit, Dali and Oppenheim distorted the everyday aesthetic in pursuit of the surrealist ideal.
Like many great movements of the twentieth century, Surrealism sought to revolutionise art and society around it. The concept of revolution deployed itself through resistance to rationality. Andre Breton claimed art was to exist in the “absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from aesthetic concerns.”[1] Surrealism aimed for a social revolution through the restructuring of repressive mechanisms of consciousness and destabilising rational centres of power and control. This meant opening the door to the imagination. In doing so, surrealists strived to question functionality and embrace the irrational.
Figure One. Salvador Dali, Lobster Telephone, 1938 (painted plaster, metal, and bakelite found object – telephone), Tate, London.
Dali’s use of facture debunks rational thought. Lobster Telephone (see figure 1) amalgamates two seemingly unrelated objects, a plastic lobster and a telephone.[2] The juxtaposition is made all the more potent by the implications of their convergence. A telephone is traditionally intended to occupy the intimate space next to one’s ear. The introduction of a large, clawed sea creature to this space propels the viewer into an irrational and unwanted plane. Terry Riggs describes the conjunction of the two as Dali creating something “playful and menacing.”[3] But the two feelings are mutually exclusive. A viewer is incapable of feeling at ease in either emotion given the effect of the other but is instead forced to experience both incessantly. It is a subjective experience but entirely crafted by Dali. For surrealists, the function of an object was intended to be symbolic rather than practical. In facilitating a void function, Dali fulfils Breton’s manifesto by destabilising the viewer’s rationality when engaging with this work. Unlike with Oppenheim, this revolt of thought plays out through a male lens.[4]
A commitment to the social revolution framed Surrealism. It aimed to be a solution to art, and the eye and mind of society.[5] However, right from Breton’s manifesto Surrealism was ignorant of gender politics.[6] Artists such as Oppenheim not only developed surrealist concepts but validated the entire premise of revolution. The fascination for Pelzhandschuhe (see figure 2) stems from, like Lobster Telephone, the resistance to the rational order. Fur gloves are traditionally intended to be worn by high-end consumers of fashion. However, wooden fingers fill the space a viewer would put their hands. It is a violation of a viewer’s conscious assumptions of fashion.[7] Like her male counterparts, Oppenheim strips the object of its function.[8] Bretons words “to hound the mad beast of function” is explored literally in Pelzhandschuhe. Thomas McEvilley suggested that some of her glove works hinted at the beast within, and Pelzhandschuhe’s facture drags the beast to the surface.[9] Pelzhandschuhe points to the “dichotomy of nature and culture.”[10] It was to be nature which would redeem the discrimination of culture.[11] Pelzhandschuhe achieves a state of revolution in the lack of rational function, but also through the political intent to engage with the gendered aspects of revolution.
Figure Two. Meret Oppenheim, Pelzhandschuhe, 1936 (mixed media), Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland.
The uncanny is the centre of the Surrealist sensory experience. Ernst Jentsch coined the term in 1906, using the German word ‘unheimlich,’ meaning unhomely, to describe the time where the unknown is initially perceived with prejudice.[12] Sigmund Freud revised the concept to describe the psychological experience of anxiety triggered by the familiar within a defamiliar context.[13] The uncanny encompassed the simultaneous experience of something as familiar and alien. Freud suggested the unknown, hidden, and repressed, exist in a ‘class of frightening’ which instinctively draws one back to the old and familiar.[14] The uncanny subsisted in Surrealism through poetic juxtapositions of metamorphosed objects.
Dali embraces the uncanny by juxtaposing the opposing forces of lobster and telephone. In the first display at the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism, Dali used a real lobster that was left to rot atop a telephone.[15] This augments the viewer’s radical sensory experience. The juxtaposition expands to include something no longer merely dangerous but repellent. The viewer can discern the different elements that make up Lobster Telephone as two normal objects, a tool and a foodstuff. However, when brought together in the artistic arena, the work provokes the “viewer to confront the things we repress.”[16] Adam Goodall noted that Dali took great delight in the fact that the lobster’s genitalia aligned with the phone’s mouthpiece.[17] For Dali, the two elements denote sexual connotations. However, the viewer’s sense of sexuality is perverse. It is enveloped in the context of claws and decay. The result of this amalgamation is the construction of a new reality both familiar and alien. It is the role of the viewer to complete the uncanny by experiencing inner repulsion to what is before them.
Like Dali, Oppenheim premises the uncanny on a confused and even jarring sensory experience.[18] Pelzhandschuhe is tactile. Alongside the sensations of the fur, the fingers themselves connote and violate the idea of touch. Juxtapositions of hard and soft produce an uncanny experience to a level of convulsive beauty. The viewer recognises the gloves and fingers, but in this union they become violated. While the viewer can imagine the warmth of wearing gloves, they repel from a perceived sense of mutilation.[19] Oppenheim has staged Pelzhandschuhe to make the gloves appear severed from their original body. The scarlet nails are reminiscent of blood and augment this impression. Pelzhandschuhe is caught between death and life. It is an unhinged experience, but it goes beyond the initial forms. According to Fred Camper, the work is more than an irrationality but delves into the dichotomy of male and female. The painted nails and glove garment suggest femininity, yet the fingers seem to emerge from the fur like a penis.[20] The duality allows women to utilise the aspects of man and become both erotic and predator.[21] This convulsive beauty truly makes the experience of Pelzhandschuhe uncanny.
Figure Three. Salvador Dali, Great Masturbator, 1929 (oil on canvas), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.
Freud’s theories of the fragmented mind served as a conceptual framework for Surrealist art. In attempting to capture the unconscious self, Freud devised a methodology of the id, ego, and superego.[22] The id describes the unconscious part of the mind of instinct.[23] It is the childlike or animalistic impulse. The ego refers to the part that reacts to the outside world. It responds to higher moral functions or merely even socially accepted behaviours and attitudes. The superego mediates the relationship between the id and ego. In particular, the ego represses the id and censors the expression of the unconscious self.[24] Surrealists intended to remove the ego and allow the full reign of the id. Symbolism and unusual perspectives created realistic but impossible dreamscapes to urge the viewer to channel the id over ego.[25]
Great Masturbator (see figure 3) is a dreamscape on par with Freudian principles by channelling Dali’s unconscious desires.[26] Great Masturbator consists of a large, waxy, yellow head, with red cheeks, elongated eyelashes, with the nose pushed to the ground.[27] This creature has no mouth, but a large grasshopper clings in its place. The insect’s belly writhes with ants, that scurry up onto the tortured face. While Oppenheim intended to channel the viewer’s id, Great Masturbator channels Dali’s first and foremost. Critics recognise it as a strange but undeniable self-portrait.[28] They link Great Masturbator to repressed fears of insects in Dali’s childhood.[29] But when one considers the title alongside subject matter, Dali’s id encompasses more. Commentators generally agree that up until meeting his wife Gala, onanism defined Dali’s sexuality.[30] The nude, female bust that protrudes from the neck is associated with Gala. She is erotic and symbolic of the male fantasy conjured when performing the act suggested by the title. This is juxtaposed by the man’s bleeding knees which suggest castration. The painted medium removes censorship by the ego around such topics. Dali has transplanted his id onto the canvas and encourages the viewer to realise they too may share similar repressed desires.
Figure Four. Meret Oppenheim, Steinfrau, 1938 (oil on cardboard), Private Collection.
Steinfrau (see figure 4) is also reminiscent of a dreamscape. The horizontal lines of beach, horizon and sea are dramatically cut across by the stone woman in diagonal. The large grey stones draw the viewer to the centre of the painting. It is difficult to discern where the stone ends, and the woman begins. The stones have two conflicting functions. First, they represent the ego. The stones fulfil the societal drive to view woman as a sexual object.[31] The weight of the stones represent the world, or man specifically, holding the woman in her place.[32] Second, they capture the id. The stones indicate mother nature’s creation.[33] There is a strong tactility to the water. Mansén describes the sea as providing a ‘sense of womb water’ which transfers the power back onto women.[34] Oppenheim herself claimed, “every person is both male and female.”[35] This duality plays out in the ‘coded form’ of the senses.[36] The experience is intended to infect the viewer ‘from fingertips and toes to thoughts.’[37] The internal impulse of the viewer, regardless of gender, is to return to the safety of the womb. Oppenheim challenges the viewer to recognise the ego and push through to the id.
Breton’s theory of automatism refers to the complete creative process.[38] It encompasses the process of creating art without the use of conscious thought and the use of the viewer’s subconscious mind to access the material.[39] Dali coined the term ‘paranoiac-critical method’ for the practice of creating double images to encourage an automaton state.[40] For Dali, this meant invoking a paranoid state. Dali remarked, “the only difference between myself and a madman, is that I am not mad!”[41] However, commentators critiqued that Dali’s delusions never truly governed his mind as he could capture them on the canvas.[42] Oppenheim employed the premise of Dali’s method. However, in practice, automatism increasingly mixed with androgyny. It was the blurring of boundaries that would facilitate the viewer’s, rather than the artist’s, automaton experience.
Dali’s painterly techniques encouraged free association to achieve the automaton experience. Great Masturbator recalls the Surrealist drawing game ‘exquisite corpse.’ The humanoid form morphs into 1900s style architecture on the right. A hook is snagged to the top of the head, while boulders pile on the back. The mass amalgamates the dualities of man and women, beast and human, and pain and pleasure. Unlike the exquisite corpse which relies on chance and collaboration, Great Masturbator exists in Dali’s own ambiguous space. Dali leveraged a hyper-realistic technique to make the viewer’s initial perception all the more compelling.[43] Unlike Oppenheim, Dali does not quite cross into the realm of androgyny. The female and male figures remain distinct. Although a collection of forms, it is possible to take each separately. With Oppenheim, you cannot take the stone without the woman. Great Masturbator channels Dali’s subconscious fears, desires, and perception which include a degree of separation. But in the same way Great Masturbator holds a mirror up to Dali, it holds one to the viewer. The technique coupled with the hallucinogenic subject matter encourages the viewer to join Dali in the paranoid state, not merely as an observer but a participant. The double images allow the viewer to simulate delusion in the artistic space and retain their sanity outside it.[44]
Oppenheim blurs the boundaries of subject matter. Steinfrau is an irrational hybrid. As the title suggests, it is indeterminate between stone and woman and plays several of tensions. The viewer is left in a state of crisis by encountering the numerous juxtapositions of solid and liquid; animal and mineral; hard and soft; wet and dry.The simple colours and ambiguous shapes explore beyond androgyny of forms to “androgyny of the mind.”[45] Informe is present. The viewer has to build up the forms and simultaneously deconstruct them to experience the stone and the women as separate entities and as one irrational hybrid. Androgyny must be contextualised against Oppenheim’s existence as a woman in the twentieth century. Oppenheim’s work was often dismissed for her male counterparts, and she was characterised as a muse for the likes of Man Ray rather than an established (and successful) artist in her own right. Oppenheim encouraged the mixed categories of man and women, beast and human among other fusions to facilitate the automaton experience. In doing so, the mind was truly free to wander in an automaton state and make its connections based on the subconscious rather than the learned conscious of society.
Surrealist concepts are complex and demand understanding of the philosophical and historical background alongside a direct engagement with the tactility and sensory aspects. A loose definition of the ‘surreal’ denotes the ‘strange’ and ‘dreamlike.’ The concepts behind Surrealism prove something much greater than that. The concepts overlap, extend and distort one another. In doing so, they facilitate the Surrealist intention of rejecting a mere rationale vision of life.[46] Surrealism premised the idea of bringing forth the ‘beloved imagination.’[47] This did not mean denying reality but unleashing the subconscious mind upon reality.
[1] Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 5.
[2] The Art Story, “Salvador Dalí: Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Filmmaker, Printmaker, and Performance Artist.”
[3] Riggs, “Lobster Telephone, Salvador Dali, 1936.”
[4] Goodall, “Le Téléphone Aphrodisiaque: A Review of Lobsters.”
[5] Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage, 63.
[6] Scott, “The Pivotal Role That Women Have Played in Surrealism.”
[7] Camper, “A Woman and Her Objects.”
[8] ibid.
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid.
[12] Tate, “The Uncanny.”
[13] ibid.
[14] ibid.
[15] Goodall, “Le Téléphone Aphrodisiaque: A Review of Lobsters.”
[16] ibid.
[17] ibid.
[18] Riggs, “Lobster Telephone, Salvador Dali, 1936.”
[19] Mansén, “Fingertip Knowledge,” 8.
[20] Camper, “A Woman and Her Objects.”
[21] Schirner, “Meret Oppenheim in the Martin-Groupius Bau.”
[22] Pearch, “Salvador Dali: Master of Surrealism.”
[23] ibid.
[24] ibid.
[25] ibid.
[26] ibid.
[27] Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, “The Great Masturbator,” 2.
[28] ibid.
[29] ibid.
[30] ibid.
[31] “Steinfrau (Stone Woman) by Meret Oppenheim.”
[32] ibid.
[33] ibid.
[34] Mansén, “Fingertip Knowledge,” 11.
[35] Camper, “A Woman and Her Objects.”
[36] Verlag, “Meret Oppenheim Retrospective.”
[37] Mansén, “Fingertip Knowledge,”11.
[38] Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 5.
[39] Tate, “Automatism.”
[40] Gottesman, “A Brief History of Surrealist Master Salvador Dalí.”
[41] Humboldt State University Library, “Salvador Dali – The Paranoid Critical Transformation Method.”
[42] ibid.
[43] Gottesman, “A Brief History of Surrealist Master Salvador Dalí.”
[44] The Art Story, “Salvador Dalí: Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Filmmaker, Printmaker, and Performance Artist.”
[45] National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Meret Oppenheim.”
[46] Tate, “Surrealism.”
[47] Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 1.
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About the Author:
Emily is a fourth year BA/LLB (Hons) student majoring in history, art history and law. She is particularly interested in contemporary art.
