Surrealist art has always been interesting to me. Its the kind of art I can just stare at in silence, trying to interpret it as many ways as possible. Like dreams, surrealism is based on expressing the unconscious using situations, people, and objects we are familiar with coupled with unexpected juxtapositions. As dreams attempt to express repression within the human psyche threw the latent content of dreams, I look for that sort of latent content within surreal art.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis who's theories are the base of surrealism has his own interesting interpretation of the theory itself. Wikipedia states:
"Freud initiated the psychoanalytic critique of Surrealism with his remark that what interested him most about the Surrealists was not their unconscious but their conscious. His meaning was that the manifestations of and experiments with psychic automatism highlighted by Surrealists as the liberation of the unconscious were highly structured by ego activity, similar to the activities of the dream censorship in dreams, and that therefore it was in principle a mistake to regard Surrealist poems and other art works as direct manifestations of the unconscious, when they were indeed highly shaped and processed by the ego. In this view, the Surrealists may have been producing great works, but they were products of the conscious, not the unconscious mind, and they deceived themselves with regard to what they were doing with the unconscious. In psychoanalysis proper, the unconscious does not just express itself automatically but can only be uncovered through the analysis of resistance and transference in the psychoanalytic process."
Before reading that I always felt the presence of the ego in surrealism expressions. I also notice that threw out surreal art there are a lot of Masonic references and Monarch Program symbolism. Like masonic checkerboard floors which you see often in surreal paintings, and also pillars, pyramids, masks, one eye symbolism, and butterflies are some of the common reoccurring themes.
The fact that the art stems from the unconscious then has me wondering why there are these references in the art. Where they intentionally placed in the work of art or truly of the artists' unconscious? And if they are truly of the unconscious what does that say about what is repressed in the minds of these artists?
Though surrealism was originally thought of as a rebellion against commercialism and materialism, Surrealism wound up having its greatest influence on the glamorous, elitist worlds of fashion and design.
