What is the influence/legacy of dadaism and surrealism?

von: Nadine Beck

From the fur-lined tea-cup of Meret Oppenheim to the hallucinatory dream narratives of Salvador Dali, it is possible that no “ism” of the last century changed our way of looking at the world in quite as dramatic a fashion as Surrealism.” The author of its original manifesto fixed upon psychic automatism, the Freudian “unconscious” as a foundation of the art form, but Karl Marx muscles his way in as well with his social revolution against repression.”1

Surrealism was a movement you could join or of which you could have been expelled. Its centre was Paris, where it was dominated and controlled by Andre Breton, and the time where it was the most unified was settled between the two World Wars. The surrealists aimed to eliminate the logic and dissolve the boundaries between the “normal” and the “fantastic” to create a better world while using free associative games and the power of the unconscious mind. It finally came to an end with Breton’s death in 1966, but its influence is still lasting and contaminating the world like a virus.

However, Surrealism was, as his followers were not tired to emphasize, always a way of living, too. It was a mental attitude, and could therefore not be reduced to being a historical episode only. There are still surrealist activities going on until today - the French group ACTUAL and the surroundings of the Chicago art magazine Arsenal, A Magazine of Anarchist Strategy and Culture, are such examples. There are still surrealistic texts translated and anthologised, and the after-effects and consequences of the surrealist revolution are still noticeable.2 Surrealism had major influences on several generations of artists. Its emphasis on collective work and the abolition of the differentiation between private and public matters, artist and consumer or observer have been, amongst others, picked up and further developed by the Situationists and the Fluxus-movement. Its interest in collages established this medium as a viable form of art production and its integrative idea of language that considered spoken, visualised or written down pictures as equal forms of a common, primary mental material, has inspired many works of art. Surrealism’s interest in automatism and the connection it drew between the thinking and acting had a formative influence on the work of the young Abstract Expressionists, which then themselves had a major influence on the art that followed them.3

Therefore, Surrealism can rarely be defined like any of the “isms” that modern art is usually split up into. Its influence is ubiquitous, but exactly in the guideline Breton pushed through, he stressed that Surrealism is not a style but an attitude of mind, and that makes it difficult to concretely establish proof of this influence. Owing to this, you can, in a certain sense, call any art that gives subjectivity priority or uses the functional methods of the mind and brain as a subject as standing under the “surrealistic” influence. Furthermore, the word has found entry into the colloquial everyday language, so that nearly every work of the fine arts, literature or film that has a hallucinatory touch or is set up from unconnected fragments is classified as “surrealistic”.

Surrealism was an international movement that was spread and spread the word through the publications of its ideas as well as due to the fact that its members moved from Paris (back) into the whole wide world. Its sphere of influence was vast and its ramifications numerous. The success and popularity is above all traceable to what extend the world of fashion and especially that of advertising made use of its pictorial language. Although the initial case for this kind of publicity was created by the Surrealists themselves: in 1939, Salvador Dali designed decorations for a shop window of the Bonwit Teller warehouse in the famous Fifth Avenue in New York, drew an advertisement for perfume and created a textile pattern for Elsa Schiaparelli including a shoe hat.4

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1 http://www.theconnection.org/shows/02/20020227_b_main.asp

2 Bradley, Fiona, Surrealismus (Hatje-Cantz-Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruitz, 2001) p.73

3 ibid. p. 73

4 ibid. p. 74