Surrealism and Magic Realism Other Realities Surrealism and Magic Realism

“The film seems to be the involuntary imitation of the dream.” Luis Bunuel

Surrealism The movement lasted from 1924 to 1941. It used shocking, irrational, or absurd imagery and Freudian dream symbolism to challenge the traditional function of art to represent reality.

Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989) Andre Breton (1896 – 1966) Max Ernst (1890 – 1976) Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963) Luis Bunuel (1900 – 1983)

Dadaist Roots In the process of creating dada art, the artist held no special significance; he or she was merely the vessel through which the art emerged. The creative process became a work of automation, relying on chance to relay the voice of the unconscious.

Dadaists saw art as a pretentious luxury, so they set out to change the context in which art was to be experienced. Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) abandoned painting in 1913 and instead began selecting what he called ‘‘readymades,’’ everyday objects with seemingly no artistic value.

Dada Manifesto in 1918 Dada flourished on nihilism, chaos, unseriousness, and a dark sense of humor.

Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. It was surrealism’s declaration of the rights of man through the liberation of the unconscious. The goal of surrealism was to synthesize dream and reality so that the resulting art challenged the limits of representation and perception.

Surrealism abandoned the dada goal of art as a direct transmitter of thought and focused instead on expressing the rupture and duality of language through imagery.

The surrealist image could be either verbal or pictorial and had a twofold function. First, images that seem incompatible with each other should be juxtaposed together in order to create startling analogies that disrupt passive audience enjoyment and conventional expectations of art. Second, the image must mark the beginning of an exploration into the unknown rather than merely representing a thing of beauty.

Surrealism abandoned the dada goal of art as a direct transmitter of thought and focused instead on expressing the rupture and duality of language through imagery . The surrealist painter Salvador Dali used the technique of photographic realism in order to discredit the world of reality. By depicting dream objects (melting clocks, for example) in everyday surroundings, he blurred the line between reality and fantasy.

Magic Realism Magical Realism works is because, in some unexplained way, another order of existence has intersected with, collided with, or bled across into what would otherwise be everyday reality. It is not the exchange of one set of rules for another; that would be fantasy or science fiction. Nor is it the simple existence of the unexplained or the uncanny, which can easily veer into horror.