Frame Surrealism In Theatre

The influence of surrealist art on society on the past centuries has been powerful, and artists like Salvador Dali contributed a lot to this form of art, in this research paper I piece together the career and life then by focusing on one of his remarkable artworks and trying to analyze it and how it affected the target audience of the culture and society and for all these topics which makes the main questions in my research paper I did a research to know more about them so that I can be able to link them together and understands how they affected the society.(1)

In this discussion, I hope to put a different spin on surrealism and the grotesque by drawing on the works of Sartre, and if we're not too dizzy from spinning when all is said and done, I shall have put together a way to investigate the grotesque in Modernist art and contemporary life. After a summary of the surrealist's use of Freud and a look at Sartre's criticism of surrealism, we will look at surrealism in Sartre's work and derive an existentialist definition of the grotesque and examine how this might reconfigure the surrealist goal of liberation. Surrealist art is almost always analyzed in terms of Freudian psychoanalytic theory because the surrealists openly announced Freud's study of the psyche as the inspiration for the practice of surrealism. Andr‚ Breton, author of the many surrealist "Manifestoes" and the self-appointed spokesman and scribe of the surrealist movement, eulogized Freud, who died in 1939, by writing that: ". .

Surrealism is a movement that built off of the burgeoning look into art, psychology, and the workings of the mind. Popularly associated with the works of Salvador Dali, Surrealist art takes imagery and ideology and creates correlation where there is none, creating new forms of art. In this essay I will look to explore the inception of the surrealist movement, including the Surrealist Manifesto, to stress the importance of these artists and their work in the 20th century and beyond. I also will look to films from our European Cinema course to express how films incorporate the influence of surrealism both intentionally and unintentionally.

The similarities lie within the struggle to shatter the conventional norms and discernment of society with surrealism endeavoring to do so toward the prudish and aristocratic society that imbue the history of France leading up to the crusade. The Harlem

Surrealism was one of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th Century. André Breton consolidated Surrealism as a movement in the early 1920s, trying to achieve the “total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it[1]” through innovative and varied ideas. Surrealism deeply influenced the world in the era between the two world wars and played a big role in the diffusion and adoption of psychology worldwide. Surrealism faded after World War II, but its revolutionary genius has influenced every artistic movement ever since.

It developed out of Dadaism and depicted the world of enlightenment, i.e., surreal world. It was born soon after Dada, which emphasized metaphysical paintings inspired by the imagination and accidental juxtaposition of objects. It aimed to make people become more aware of poetic aspects, rather than scientific ones, by exploring and explaining unconscious mind and freeing imagination. Despite Dada’s limitations, the exploration of Freud’s suggestions done by surrealists opened countless new paths. Surrealism goes even further from nihilistic Dadaism, which denies humankind, society, order, ethics, and art, and pursued unconscious world, dream world, and automatic world, thus seeking a new artistic

Freud’s theories have launched what is now known as the psychoanalytic approach to literature. Freud was interested in writers, especially those who depended largely on symbols. Such writers tend to tinge their ideas and figures with mystery or ambiguity that only make sense once interpreted, just as the analyst tries to figure out the dreams and bizarre actions that the unconscious mind of a neurotic releases out of repression. A work of literature is thus treated as a fantasy or a dream that Freudian analysis comes to explain the nature of the mind that produced it. The purpose of a work of art is what psychoanalysis has found to be the purpose of the dream: the secret gratification of an infantile and forbidden wish that has been repressed into the unconscious (Wright 765).

Sigmund Freud created strong theories in science and medicine that are still studied today. Freud was a neurologist who proposed many distinctive theories in psychiatry, all based upon the method of psychoanalysis. Some of his key concepts include the ego/superego/id, free association, trauma/fantasy, dream interpretation, and jokes and the unconscious. “Freud remained a determinist throughout his life, believing that all vital phenomena, including psychological phenomena like thoughts, feelings and phantasies, are rigidly determined by the principle of cause and effect” (Storr, 1989, p. 2). Through the discussion of those central concepts, Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis becomes clear as to how he construed human character.

What elements of dada and surrealism suggest the influence of Freud? The 20th Century marked a changed in how people viewed the known world. Since its beginning art has played a major role in how people were able to express themselves. The early 20th century brought rise to new and exciting art forms. These were types of writings, paintings and, documentaries that no one had ever seen before. From expressionism to Dadaism types of work ranged by all means of the artist. About the 1920's a new wave of art would soon be seen worlds over. This art form introduced psychology in a new way to look at the conscious and subconscious minds. From the beginning Dadaism and surrealism showed true signs of influence from

The surrealist artists believed the dream state and subconscious mind to be an untapped and very fertile creative fount of inspiration. The symbolism of dreams and the expressive images generated by the subconscious were far more thought provoking than the representational, logical images of the conscious mind. The surrealist artists were creating art out of what others thought to be garbled and unintelligible. They were in effect taking a concept created to heal and using it to create art instead. They were on to something with this. No matter what the medium or the style used, a bit of the self becomes visible and evident in the result. Art therapy is one of the modern descendants of this movement.

As Dali moved into his Surrealist years he became more interested in psychology and exploring his own fears and fantasies. Dali’s Surrealist period last from 1929-1940, in which years he joined the Surrealist Movement, and shortly after became a leader in this movement. In order to bring images from his “subconscious mind”, Dali began to use a method to find inspiration for his art; he would induce hallucinatory states in himself. As his work matured, and his fame grew

At the turn of the century Paris was one of the capitals of culture and art to the outside world. However, the truth of the matter was that this taboo-ridden society was being run by an aristocracy that was repressing the arts. Naturally, when World War 1 broke out, the suppressed French society finally had a release and a rebellion against order arose. WWI specifically affected the theatre of French and it’s aftermath. From the ashes of war the avant-garde theatre grew and styles such as Dadaism and Surrealism were born. It was both the climate of culture before the war and the devastation of the war that lead to the outbreak of avant-garde theatre in France.

The surrealist movement holds emotional authenticity and social activism as the highest ideals. Influenced by the work of Freud and Jung, the arts are viewed as psychic manifestations that go deeper than external reality. Spontaneous techniques, like psychic automatism (i.e. automatic writing and drawing), generate images from the unconscious and result in content similar to dream experiences and contemplating these images provides a new experience of reality (McNiff, 2009).

As mentioned surrealism, like Dadaism, tried to distance itself from contemporary culture and sought to shock the familiarity of reality. Hence, the unconscious has a centrepiece in surrealist art and the underlying theme was to create images of such unconscious situation or universes. This was primarily achieved with the use of symbolism and the placing of objects in unfamiliar settings. This would revitalize and redefine such objects outside the conventional reality that is the adversary in surrealist art and hence create the desired conflict between the conventional and the unconscious (Waldberg 1997; Martin 1987).

ostmodernism was a movement that began in the 1960s that affected all forms of art and literature of that time period. Postmodernism followed modernism and it sought to challenge the ideas and values of modernistic theatre, modernism was formed to shake up theatre, introducing new theories of science and technology to explain the world, whereas postmodern theatre raises more questions than supplying the answers for the audience. Modernism created a ‘grand-narrative’ whereby there was only one meaning which would be told to the audience. Postmodernism broke down the ‘grand-narrative’ when Jean-François Lyotard wrote La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979), he came up with