Surreal or Schizoid? Manic media manipulation or....?

[omega minimo]

Many DU discussions on various subjects involve the perceptions, awareness and responsiveness (or not) of the American public; as well as the immense power that the consolidated media has over them.

This piece from Utne reader proposes:
--that we are "surrealists without knowing it"
--"surrealism asserted that...what was important was tapping the power of everyone's unconscious and sparking a revolution both psychic and political"
--that the bombardment of imagery and experiences that dominate American life either overwhelm or empower us, depending on our attitude.

"If advertising and music videos have trained us to appreciate a surreal flow of discontinuities, then we ought to be able to enjoy them, creatively and intentionally, in our own lives"

How much do quick cut media techniques and sound bite political posturing affect the issues that DU addresses?
Do most people feel "overwhelmed" or "empowered"?
Does a constant "flow of discontinuities" create a distracted and disconnected public?
Anyone for a bit of "surrealist elation"?

http://www.utne.com/pub/2005_129/promo/11633-1.html

The Surreal Life
Surrealism is not only alive and well, it could be the antidote to our modern angst
—By Jon Spayde, Utne magazine
May / June 2005 Issue

(liberally or surrealistically edited by OM <snips>)

In the early 1920s, poet Andre Breton and a handful of like-minded poets and artists in Paris ... became convinced that the innovative, creative power that had previously been thought of as the province of artists alone lay latent in all human minds...surrealism asserted that form mattered little; what was important was tapping the power of everyone's unconscious and sparking a revolution both psychic and political.

...The one quality that nearly all surrealist art shared was reveling in odd juxtapositions -- visual and verbal non sequiturs that created a sense that ordinary life and dream are two sides of one thin coin. Breton became convinced that daily life itself could be experienced surrealistically.

...we mostly experience surrealism in its descendant, postmodernism, a steady flow of incongruous, often disconnected images from many times and places. We flip from the History Channel to CNN to ads that Dali might have created; the Internet takes us on an even wilder ride around the world and from psyche to psyche. Our daily lives are full of encounters with people from different cultures and other surprises of a thousand kinds. Although sophisticated artists can make postmodernism meaningful, for many of us it's a psychic overload from which we seek relief in everything from simplicity circles to suburban "safety."

What if we went the other way and reclaimed our own experience in a surrealist spirit? If advertising and music videos have trained us to appreciate a surreal flow of discontinuities, then we ought to be able to enjoy them, creatively and intentionally, in our own lives: the Arabic we hear at the corner store, the anime comics in the bookstore rack, the bizarre profusion of the supermarket, mixed with our dreams and fantasies. A transition from being overwhelmed "consumers of images" to empowered artists of the everyday could begin with a shift of attitude from postmodern prostration to surrealist elation.

[staticstopper]

1. Great post! Gets to the heart

of the problem we are now in.

(How in the heck are they not, at this very moment, being run down Pennsylvania Avenue with pich forks and torches :banghead: )

[omega minimo]

2. How do you stop the static, staticstopper?

[newyawker99]

3. Hi staticstopper!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[omega minimo]

4. Hi newyawker99

Thanks fer being so welcoming to newbies. Ya got me when I came on board.

:hi:

[bloom]

5. I think about this sort of thing a lot

What is the best way to express what is going on?

There is so much input and so much negativity in the way our whole culture operates.

It does get overwhelming.

The 20's in Paris were great with James Joyce and e.e.cummings...others. I would like to know more about it.

Thanks for the post.

[omega minimo]

7. Altho Dali is considered "The" surrealist

he was not part of the group for long.

Check out Andre Breton and the rest.

[bloom]

6. The price of life has become life itself...

IOW - our civilization is killing us.


"Until we are able to live on the earth without restraint, and as long as the land is owned for profit, there will always be those … who cannot pay the ever-increasing price of survival."

http://www.zazie.at/Portland/00_WebPages/TheExplodingRose.htm

[bloom]

8. Another quote from following the links:

"SURREALISM is not a poetic form. It is a scream of the mind finding itself again and it intends to desperately crush its shackles with artificial hammers, if need be. (Bureau of Surrealist Research, Paris January, 27, 1925)"


http://www.infosurr.net/

[omega minimo]

9. Everything tends to make us believe

"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions."

--Andre Breton

[omega minimo]

10. Continuous Discontinuousness

"If advertising and music videos have trained us to appreciate a surreal flow of discontinuities, then we ought to be able to enjoy them, creatively and intentionally, in our own lives"

TRAINED being the operative word. A relentless "flow of discontinuities" does not Surrealism make.

www.psychcentral.com

<snip>
Surrealism is an artistic movement and an aesthetic philosophy that aims for the liberation of the mind by emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the unconscious.

Originated in early-twentieth century European avant-garde art and literary circles, many early Surrealists were associated with the earlier Dada movement. Surrealism was, from the beginning, an expressly revolutionary movement, in the broadest sense, encompassing actions intended to advance radical political, social, cultural and personal change.

The organized Surrealist movement began in the early 1920s; the publication of AndreBreton's Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 is an important early landmark in the movement's history. While surrealism's most important center was in Paris, it spread throughout Europe and to North America during the course of the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's.

...Surrealism, as a prominent critique of rationalism and capitalism, and a theory of integrated aesthetics and ethics had influence on later movements, including many aspects of postmodernism....The movement in the visual arts includes such figures as Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Rene Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Toyen, Wilfredo Lam, Paul Nash, Conroy Maddox, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Francis Picabia and of course Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism as well as in cinema and commercial illustration.

The term "surreal" is also applied more generally to describe the juxtaposition of ordinary events, actions or objects in a manner where the totality does not comport with the ordinary "sense" or social decorum. In this sense it is the successor to the idea of the "fantastic" in Victorian art and literature.

[omega minimo]

11. Sorry NO Runaway Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even

This thread is slipping down the page like melting clocks.




:kick:

[bloom]

12. I think it is the perfect movement for our time...

:bounce:

I used to do a lot surrealist artwork without knowing that much of the political aspect.

Orwell was probably influenced....


"It has a precursor which appears in a much earlier note from Duchamp's Green Box, published in 1934 but written 20 years earlier, where he imagines a society in which one must pay for the air one breathes. "
///
"As with many movements of the period, including expressionism, its diagnosis of the "problem" of the realism and capitalist civilisation is the restrictive overlay of false rationality, including social and academic convention, on the free functioning of the instinctual urges within the mind. But this dry connection does not get at the root of surrealism's broader appeal: according to Dalí, it was that surrealism did not reject the sense of beauty and aesthetic appeal of the past, merely the confines of it (however, this analysis may have been criticised by many surrealists, who considered the movement extra-aesthetic). It also embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of underlying madness and darkness of the mind. Dalí's famous quote is, "The only difference between myself and a madman is I am not MAD!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist

[omega minimo]

13. "restrictive overlay of false rationality"

indeed.

"It also embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of underlying madness and darkness of the mind."

...and they were more interested in dreams than drugs (which is what much visionary art is associated with by non-artists).

[bloom]

14. I love dream images

I dreamed recently of my son with a lawn mower - mowing in the ocean - near the shore as if he were mowing a lawn.

I didn't realize until I started typing that - that it is probably related to what I've been reading on global warming and the oceans.

[omega minimo]

15. Fantastic image

I agree Surrealism is timely. The essay in Utne intrigued me and thought might provoke some discussion on DU. It was a bit poppy for me, inferring that we are automatic Surrealists because we have been "trained" by MTV and manic editing. The imagery is there, but it remains to be seen whether there is an Eye in the center of the storm actually making the connection, the spark of odd juxtaposition.

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them." --Albert Einstein

John Moss wrote the excellent "Conscious Dreaming." Here is a link:
http://www.mossdreams.com
                  
                  

[timtom]

23. Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even

Where did that come from?

The Firesign Theater used that phrase in "Bride of Firesign".

It sounds almost medieval.

[omega minimo]

25. We're all Bohos on this bus

http://www.marcelduchamp.net/bride.htm

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, commonly referred to as "the Green Box," is a green-flocked, self-hinged cardboard box containing one color plate and 93 facsimile reproductions of notes, drawings, and photographs of the painting of the same name. Marcel Duchamp, under the guise of his alter ego Rrose Sélavy, produced 320 of these green boxes (of which 20 are deluxe editions) in 1934. Both regular and deluxe editions are known as the Éditions Rrose Sélavy.

The original painting, La Mariée Mise à Nu Par ses Célibataires, Même ("The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even") was left unfinished. In 1923, after working on it for nine years, Duchamp abandoned it. (The painting consists of two large panels of glass, one above the other, displaying the top and bottom of an intricate mechanical diagram. It is usually called, simply, the Large Glass.) "All along, while painting , I wrote a number of notes which were to compliment the visual experience like a guide book." (1) These notes were intended "to accompany and explain (as might an ideal exhibition-catalogue) my painting on clear glass." (2)

Michel Sanouillet, one of the first publishers of Duchamp's writings, pointed out that "he relationship of the notes to the Large Glass becomes clear if one bears in mind that the Glass, in Duchamp's own words, is both ‘a wedding of mental and visual reactions' and ‘an accumulation of ideas.' The point is that ‘some ideas require a graphic language if they are not to be violated: this is my Glass. But a commentary of notes may be useful, like the captions that go with the photos in a Galeries Lafayette catalog. This is the raison d'être of my Box.'" (3)

[timtom]

26. Thanks, Omega

I went and googled it after I read your reply and downloaded an image of the large glass.

What an intriguing phrase.

[bpilgrim]

16. they feel informed

but they have really been programmed.

is you study the media as a stream and look at the main themes you can easily see how DESIGNED it is, and its not god doin the designing, to manufacture consent (chomsky)

it is actually very frightening when you thing about how many folks buy into this programming.

peace

[omega minimo]

18. George Carlin: "Ever go into a room & forget what you went in there for?"

"D'you realize a DOG spends its whole LIFE like that?"



Yeah, they may feel informed even though they can't remember with WHAT.




short :banghead: attention :bounce: span :scared:

[thebigidea]

17. ooo, thanks for this. Very interesting.

Being an arty snob with the first name Andre as well, I was always fascinated with the prickly, oft-pompous personality of Breton... very much enjoyed his books and essays, as "The Automatic Message" and "Magnetic Fields" fucked my mind but good as an unruly teen.

Gotta chew on this for a while...

EDIT: hmmm, I'd agree with your poppy comments. The relentless juxtaposition and click-clicking of modern medialife reminds me much more of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs' cutup theories than surrealism...

though I'll take any opening to talk surrealism!

[omega minimo]

19. Ya'd be "prickly, oft-pompous" too with that twee Dali nippin at yer heels

:evilgrin:

The Eye is dissolved in the plume of drool from Pavlov's hounds.

"More, more!" cry the foxes, knowing that the chase will never end.

[thebigidea]

20. oh, without question.... the ultimate spoiled child!

Its more of Breton's endless purges, florid excommunications, "trials", etc. that put me off... Too many control freak type issues...

But what a keen eye for good art! Great taste, a fantastic organizer, and a doubleplusgood writer.

And what a circle of friends!

There was an interesting British flick made recently about them, "Surrealissimo: The Trial of Salvador Dali" - the always good Stephen Fry plays Breton.

[omega minimo]

21. The Eye! The Eye she is dissolved!!!!!!!

They knew how to cut through the chatter. Culture war-- Bring It ON!

The experience and Experiencer are central to Surrealism. The notion was radical awareness, not zombified consumption.

And they had a sense of humor.

Squeezing tiny people out of sports drink bottles or filling a screen with flying, broken crustaceans is not Surrealism.

Dismantling a former president's legacy on the same day a memorial is dedicated to him in D.C.-- THAT"S a juxtaposition for ya! And who cares?

Sending "mexed missages" is the stock in trade of the Newspeak Doublethink Two Minute Haters.

Happy "Mission Accomplished" Day! :nuke:

[Algomas]

22. kick kick kiss kiss ssik ssik kcik kcik

[omega minimo]

24. thank youoy knaht

:scared::boring::think::wow:

Perhaps the only way to reframe absolute nonsense is with absolute nonsense.