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Where the Twain Meets: Dada and Surrealism
Distinct artistic movements, genres, and philosophies, Dada and Surrealism do cross over and share considerable points of reference. Dada made its mark on the art world first, with its genesis in Switzerland during the First World War (“Dada and Surrealism,” 1). In fact, Dada was never constrained by visual media, with poets and performance artists at the forefront of the largely political and reactive movement (“Dada and Surrealism,” 1). To call Dada avant-garde, or progressive, would be an understatement, because Dada transformed the ways people thought about and created art. Art was no longer about creating aesthetic beauty or pleasing a patron, but about actively challenging social norms, politics, and even what it means to be human. Dada art can be provocative, but is not necessarily so, with some artists using their medium to question and even “humiliate” art itself (Rubin 11). The politics of Dada have been dubbed “anarchic,” but are just as much ironic given the “anti-art” and anti-establishment sentiments brewing within its artistic circles in Europe (Papanikolas 1). Dada laid the groundwork for several other artistic movements that followed, including surrealism.
Surrealism has a definitive starting point: the publication of Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. With Breton’s manifesto, surrealism became quickly known as being more “programmatic” and formal a movement versus its looser precursor in Dada (Rubin 12). Breton begins his definition by explaining the core elements of surrealism: its emphasis on dream states and the subconscious or unconscious mind, and an acknowledgement of profound discontent with materialism and the way things are in mundane, established reality: “Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way,” (Breton 1). Far less political in tone and focus than Dada, surrealism drew far more heavily from the prevailing research in psychology and psychoanalysis (“Dada and Surrealism,” 1). Yet like Dada, Surrealism was also about the absurd and especially locating the absurd paradoxes in human existence. Dada simply focused a little more on absurdities in social and political life, including within the art community; and surrealism focused more on the peculiarities of the human imagination and altered states of consciousness. Both Dada and surrealism have survived, planting seeds that have flourished in several other genres and eras.
Both Dada and surrealism have the capacity to be conceptual, using the media to convey a message that is beyond the sum of its visual parts. Yet surrealist artists do aim for an aesthetic harmony that is evident in works by Magritte and Dali. It is almost as if Dada seeks to destroy, and surrealism seeks to put the pieces back together again—albeit in an unconventional, illogical, psychedelic or phantasmagorical way. Understandably then, there seems to be more anger embedded in Dada work than there is in surrealist art. Dada and surrealism were both products of their times, embedded firmly in their social, political, and historical contexts. World War One and its extreme violence initially gave rise to the Dada movement, which was also influenced by Marxist theory and nihilist philosophy (“Dada and Surrealism,” 1). Surrealism emerged as the artistic counterpart and synthesis of the flourishing of psychoanalysis, spiritualism, and secular humanism during and after World War II (Ades and Gale 1). The turning inward of psychoanalysis and the Jungian dream landscape characterized surrealism, making it an inadvertent predecessor to the psychedelic counterculture movement of the 1960s. Dada tended to be more extraverted, concerned with political, social, and economic institutions and their implications for human potential.
However, neither Dada nor surrealism would make any overt, literal statements about war or the human mind. It is not as if Dada was protest art, even if it might have sprung from the visceral wellspring of horrors that reverberated during and after the total war era. Similarly, surrealist art was not pandering to psychoanalysts or to be used as counterparts to psychoanalytic techniques. Artists like Duchamp, Dali, Miro, and Magritte manipulated materials in ways that empowered the viewer to take a more active role in perceiving art, and to allow art to be a catalyst for individual and collective change. Their audiences might have seemed limited at the time, but their goal would have been to reach deep into the recesses of the global mind to change the ways all people view and interact with art. The use of non-Western or pre-industrial elements as symbols in art during the early twentieth century signified not so much a romanticizing of these types of civilizations, especially viewed from the biased European eye. Rather, the goal was to show that the presumed superiority of European civilization is based on false premises.
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When Duchamp first exhibited his iconoclastic readymade works, it initially shocked the art community and then reverberated in a total change in the way art functioned in society. Surrealists and Dadaists both employed humor deftly to achieve their goals, evident particularly in Duchamp’s “Fountain” and Dali’s corpus of oddities.
Dada and surrealism both broke the boundaries of what constitutes “art,” and not just in terms of employing multimedia techniques and methods into their visual constructions and compositions. Certainly, the range of installations, collages, and assemblages is alone remarkable but both Dada and surrealism went a step further to include non-visual art forms like literature, performance, music or sound, and poetry. There are no boundaries or provisions for either Dada or surrealism, even though the latter did have a manifesto. The artist is free to deliver the message or tell the story or evoke an emotion in whatever way works best. Being unrestricted in execution meant that the variety and scope of work created during the Dada and surrealist movements are profound. There are no single defining features of either genre, only core philosophies. Their respective philosophies are similar in their ultimate goals, and different in their means, methods, and focal points.
Both Dada and surrealist artists would employ ordinary objects, known as “readymade” pieces, into their work but Dada was practically defined by its use of such items. The most prolific and renowned readymade item artist was Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp’s portfolio spans genres far beyond the readymade and even beyond Dada, but with works like “Bottlerack,” “Fountain,” and “Bicycle Wheel,” Duchamp definitively established himself as the de facto mage of readymade. Of these three readymade works, “Bicycle Wheel” was the first to roll out on the global art stage in 1913. The titular object is positioned atop an ordinary stool, in which Duchamp constructed a functional hole in which the wheel could perch and even be spun if the viewer so wished to interact with the work. “Bottlerack” was completed in 1914, and “Fountain” in 1917. “Bottlerack” takes the concept of “Bicycle Wheel” a step further, because Duchamp does not modify the readymade item at all but simply places it in front of the viewer in Dada iconoclasm and anti-art sentiment. Likewise, “Fountain” is a mere urinal, embellished only with a crass bit of bathroom graffiti: a man’s name “R. Mutt.” All three of these epitomize the principle of the readymade in the Dada vocabulary: they are “man-designed [sic], commercially produced, utilitarian objects endowed with the status of anti-art by Duchamp’s selection and tilting of them,” (Rubin 17). Perhaps on some level Duchamp invites the viewer to contemplate the difference between the curves, materials, forms, and meaning of the readymade versus what typically passes for sculpture in art salons. More likely given the Dada zeitgeist, Duchamp presents the readymade with a more poignant discursive intent: to force the viewer to question aesthetic norms and traditions, to question the role and purpose of art, and even to request the viewer to see all lived objects in a new light.
No Duchamp work, and perhaps no other work at all, can capture the iconoclasm of the Dada movement more than “L.H.O.O.Q.” In this strangely named work, Duchamp does what had not been done effectively before: boldly defacing one of the world’s most famous, visible, popular, and iconic paintings. Duchamp takes an image of DaVinci’s Mona Lisa, and draws a moustache on it with a pencil. The act is certainly provocative, brash, and seemingly childish but it is “more than just a Dada attack on high art,” (Rubin 19). Rubin claims that Duchamp was “drawing attention to a sexual ambiguity in Leonardo’s life and work,” (19). Like surrealism, Dada did sometimes have a purpose beyond the airing of grievances relative to prevailing political or social affairs.
Altering classical works of art like the Mona Lisa became somewhat of a trend in Dada and also in surrealism, one of the few visual, conceptual, and methodological points of commonality between the two movements. Sometimes the technique of altering famous work ends up blurring the distinction between Dada and surrealism altogether. For example, Man Ray’s work often straddles the boundary between the Dada and the surreal. His 1924….....
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