How to Be a Surrealist with Philippa Perry

It's 100 years since the word "surreal" was first used.

And now, you hear it everywhere.

What a riot of surreal slapstick!

Last night in Cleveland was surreal!

I'm just shaking and it's just surreal.

A woman from Brighton who was mistaken for Ivanka Trump on Twitter

by none other than the US President-elect himself

says it's all rather surreal.

For many people, surreal just means bizarre.

If you think of Surrealist art at all, you'll maybe think of those

lonely landscapes littered with melting clocks,

floating businessmen in bowler hats,

a woman who looks like a violin, a lobster where a telephone should be!

But Surrealism didn't start out like that.

I'm a psychotherapist. I'm no stranger to the world of dreams.

In this film, I'm going to take you back to the beginnings

of the Surrealist movement and trace how their interest

in the unconscious mind sparked an explosion of revolutionary ideas

that transformed art and cinema and the world around us.

Surrealism was never just a visual style.

It was a state of mind and a way of life.

I'll meet some contemporary artists

who can still channel their inner Surrealist,

and see how the experimental ideas of a group of young artists

reaching for the absurd in response to a world in crisis

would create some of the most recognisable

and popular art of the 20th century.

And I'll delve into the original Surrealist writings

for inspiration and have a go for myself...

Can you tell me your dreams that you dream when you're asleep?

..to find out what being a Surrealist is really about.

You know, I might put some clothes on.

LAUGHTER

In 1920s Paris, there were lots of artists and writers and thinkers,

and they were, on the whole, pretty disillusioned with society.

The society that had produced World War I.

Put aside for a moment the moustachioed showman Dali

and the bowler-hatted illusionist Monsieur Magritte.

At the beginning, the hero of the story was not a painter,

but a poet, Andre Breton.

Breton was a member of the absurdist art movement Dada.

But he left, like everyone else, as the group imploded.

In his 1922 poem Lachez Tout, he wrote,

"Drop everything. Drop Dada

"Drop your wife. Drop your mistress

"Drop your hopes and fears

"Park your children in the woods

"Drop the substance for the shadow

"Drop your comfortable life

"What you have been given for the future, and set off on the roads."

I know it sounds a bit bleak,

but Breton had his reasons for wanting to rearrange world order.

Breton had been a medical student during the First World War.

He worked at a psychiatric hospital in France

with men suffering from shellshock.

He saw people whose minds had responded to the trauma of war

in unexpected ways.

Breton took a special interest in their dreams

and kept records of them.

He wrote, "I believe in the future resolution of these two states -

"dream and reality,

"which are seemingly so contradictory,

"into a kind of absolute reality.

"A sur-reality."

He set out his ideas in a sort of handbook, the Surrealist Manifesto.

He defined Surrealism as, "Psychic automatism in its pure state,

"by which one proposes to express verbally,

"by means of the written word, or in any other manner,

"the actual functioning of thought.

"Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason,

"exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

"The following have performed acts of absolute Surrealism..."

And he goes on to mention his mates, who are Messrs...

Isn't it funny, he talks about doing away with order and things

and he's putting this lot in alphabetical order!

Now, you'll notice there's some

very famous names of Surrealism not there.

That's because they hadn't joined yet.

In fact, that list is a list of poets.

At the beginning of Surrealism,

the group contained very few artists.

But it wouldn't stay that way for long.

So, how do you be a Surrealist?

Well, you can try this at home, everyone.

"After you have settled yourself in a place as favourable as possible

"to the concentration of your mind upon itself,

"have writing materials brought to you."

Because we've all got servants, haven't we(?)

"Put yourself in as passive or receptive

"a state of mind as you can.

"Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough

"so that you will not remember what you're writing,

"and don't be tempted to reread what you've written."

You can see that it was a simple step from automatic writing

to automatic drawing.

Breton's idea was to produce work that was not controlled by reason.

He had said that it should be totally free from aesthetic concerns

and it wasn't important to him what it looked like.

As long as it channelled the unconscious, it would be of value.

In this 1925 drawing by Andre Masson,

you can see he's added little details onto the freeform doodle.

People have tried to interpret these drawings.

They've said that, "Oh, it's because he was

"a soldier in the First World War

"and these are all the dismembered parts".

Or other people say, "Look at the fluidity of it

"and all the bits of bodies. It's obviously to do about sex."

Whatever you read into it,

it will tell you more about you than it will about Masson.

When I look at it, the first thing I see is this shape here,

which, to me, looks like a pair of hairy testicles.

Masson moved beyond drawing and started to experiment

with other materials, including paint and sand.

Masson had a studio next to Joan Miro.

HIS experiments with Surrealism took on a different form.

He developed his automatic drawings into paintings

full of strange symbolism and biomorphic shapes,

creating dream-like images that were the beginnings

of what we might recognise today as Surrealist art.

This is the thing about Breton's rules.

He was trying to encourage people to tap into their unconscious mind

and to follow whatever they might find there.

So anyone who truly followed his rules would also have to break them.

Our understand of our unconscious mind is grounded in the work

of the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud,

the founding father of psychoanalysis.

Freud described dreams as "the royal road to the unconscious".

I can't believe I've been allowed to come and sit in Freud's chair,

in Freud's office and look at Freud's couch.

I'm not actually allowed to lie on the couch because that is

just too sacred, but to sit here, for me, a psychotherapist, is...

Well, it's quite intimidating.

You'd think, wouldn't you, because the Surrealists

were so keen on the unconscious

and Freud was so keen on the unconscious,

that they were a sort of match made in heaven,

but Freud just wanted to use the unconscious to cure madness,

rather than to explore madness.

Freud always wanted to come to conclusions.

He wanted to come to interpretations,

whereas the Surrealists were more about opening things out

and playing with what you opened out.

Our gang of young Surrealists,

intrepid explorers of the mind's creative possibilities,

did conduct their own experiments, but of a different kind to Dr Freud.

This apartment block on the Rue de Grenelle on the Left Bank in Paris

was the site of their first office, the Bureau of Surrealist Research,

opened on 11th October 1924.

And it was here that Breton and his friends

were open for business every day,

Monday to Saturday, 4.30-6.30,

in order to take confessions from members of the public,

in order to release their unconscious minds

and free them from the mores of society

and the conventions of the bourgeois.

Fellow poet Louis Aragon wrote,

"At 15 Rue de Grenelle, we've opened romantic lodgings

"for unclassifiable ideas and revolutions in progress".

They made brightly-coloured flyers known as "papillon",

that they distributed on the streets of Paris with slogans like,

"If you love love, you'll love Surrealism",

and, "Parents! Tell your children your dreams!"

They held Surrealist seances and invited people to come in

and share stories of dreams and coincidences.

I rather like this idea, so I'm going to set up my own

pop-up Bureau of Surrealist Research in a nearby street.

That's the thing about relying on random chance,

sometimes nobody turns up.

Could you tell me the last dream you had?

I can't, because I can't remember it.

-That's odd.

-I slept very well last night.

-Yeah.

But I actually can't remember my last dream.

Can you tell me "vos reves",

your dreams that you dream when you're asleep?

And what I'd really like to know is about your inner reality.

What's...the images that are coming to the fore for you?

A car.

Fabulous!

A dream where I would fly.

I would just open my arms, I would sort of glide all over the city,

all over wherever I was in the country.

And it was an absolutely wonderful feeling. I used to love it.

Once, I was driving a car and behind me,

there was a dead guy and I didn't know if I'd been doing that or not.

It wasn't the fact that it was, like,

people were dying or something, it was just... It was, like,

severely eerie and it was just very, very silent.

'In his description of the original Bureau of Surrealist Research,'

Louis Aragon said,

"We've suspended a woman from the ceiling of an empty room

"and worried men come there every day, bearers of weighty secrets.

"We're working on a task that's enigmatic, even for us."

I did have a recurring dream in childhood,

which was about a train travelling very fast through a desert.

Perhaps also a sense of something going to go wrong,

some imminent catastrophe and then it never happens, I wake up.

OK.

I would like you to draw a picture of your dream.

And as you draw your dream, can you tell me about it?

Yeah.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

So it's scary outside, but it's not so scary when you get inside?

-No.

-OK.

-No.

'The Surrealist experiment was about trying to discover

'the unconscious mind in an inclusive way, without boundaries,

'without judgment, for whoever was brave enough

'to set foot through the door.'

How does it feel to drive the car?

Er...dangerous, because I don't drive.

I dream of people I literally have not been thinking about

for 50 years.

And they were absolutely, er...the same as ever, you know?

As though, er...many, many years hadn't passed.

It's a premonition of a soon-to-come death? I don't know.

It's really weird.

Oh, my God! It's all pulsating now, the whole thing. Look at that.

They were onto something, these Surrealists, I think.

The last dream was I had a... We have a Danish guy that makes

a lot of television programmes.

Then he said in the newspapers he will die.

-The sickness is called... with the lungs.

-Uh-huh.

And I also have a problem with my lungs,

so I was crying when I saw this newspaper.

-So I have, like, a nightmare about this one.

-Yeah.

-Is that the man?

-Yeah. And his ship here.

I think you can feel your sadness

for you through your sadness for him.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Each one of these pieces of paper represents a person

that's come in here today and told me what they dreamt of in the night.

And what can be more personal than that?

And I'm feeling quite sort of flooded with it all.

This is, er... This has been, er...

it's been a bit more than I expected, actually.

It's not a game.

It feels...like we ARE going somewhere real

when we ask people to tell us their dreams.

And I feel like I've been trusted with sort of people's

sort of raw and precious insides, actually.

The Surrealist experiments with dreams

are not the same as psychotherapy.

They're not supposed to be therapeutic, for a start.

But crucially, they're not private.

For the Surrealists, dreams were a rich source material.

They'd publish the accounts they'd gathered alongside

other Surrealist experiments in a magazine -

La Revolution Surrealiste.

But it wasn't some brightly-coloured book of Surrealist art,

it was a sober and highly-intellectual effort

modelled on the scientific journals of the day.

Art historian and curator Dawn Ades

is a leading voice in the study of Surrealism.

She has reproductions of all the original magazines

and is going to help me make sense of

the early Surrealist experimental work.

There's a comment here, just underneath the inner title page,

saying that the first number of La Revolution Surrealiste

doesn't offer any definitive revelation.

It... It presents the results of automatic writing,

the narration of dreams,

but they're not actually claiming to draw any conclusions from it yet.

They are, really, experimenting.

And in a way, they kind of carry on

in the same line right the way through this

wonderful journal which has all kinds of exciting discoveries,

but never laying down the law. Never saying,

"Well, this is what you have to do and this is how you have to do it".

'That first issue has really striking examples of drawings

'and photographs, but no trace yet of those uncanny dreamscapes

'that one thinks of as Surrealist art.'

The illustrations in the magazine are very interesting.

They're there in their own right,

they're not just illustrating something else.

They had terrific debates about what visual Surrealism might be.

One of them said there can never be

any such thing as Surrealist painting.

Why was that?

It's one of the ironies of Surrealism that now it's much

better known for the artists,

but the artists were only in a footnote in the first manifesto.

But for the artists, it was really important

to belong to a movement that was not just concerned with the formal,

with the visual, with abstraction, for example.

Um... But each of the Surrealist artists responded to

the kind of ideas - to automatism, for example - in different ways.

And so there is no such thing as a Surrealist style.

Surrealism was never just a visual style. Surrealism was a way of life.

It was, you know, a state of mind and a way of life.

One of the artists most dedicated to the Surrealist life was Max Ernst.

His spontaneous response to the ideas of Surrealism

might be mistaken for some pretty basic art techniques.

But then, that was the point.

Max Ernst said he found it really difficult to make a mark

on a virgin piece of paper.

He said he had a virgin phobia.

One afternoon, in a seaside inn on a rainy day in 1925,

he noticed the whirls in the floorboards of this inn.

And he just took up a piece of paper and rubbed his pencil over it.

And the image jumped out on the paper

and suggested all sorts of things to him.

And he thought this was a great way

of using the philosophy of Surrealism,

of working with what comes to you, and a way in.

And he said it got him over his fear of virgin pieces of paper.

'The art critic Adrian Searle has agreed to help me

'try this technique, known as frottage.

'Now, the word "frottage" also has a sexual meaning,

'and if you really want your internet search history

'to look colourful, you can look that up,

'but Adrian and I are talking about art.'

Were the Surrealists the first to try and discover

their unconscious through art?

It's not at all new.

Nothing... Nothing is new, really.

Leonardo da Vinci suggested that you stare at stains on the wall,

or cracks in the pavement and use that as sort of a beginning

of a way of inventing a landscape or a... Or some kind of forms.

Nothing comes from nothing, you know?

No, I don't think the Surrealists were the first at all.

Obviously, they were people of their time

and what was current, they could talk about the unconscious

perhaps in ways that would have been unfamiliar

to someone 100 or 200 years ago.

But it was always happening whether or not people...dressed it up...

-Gave it a name, or...

-Or dressed it up, like they dressed it up.

-Yeah.

I think the surreal has always been with us, hasn't it?

-People use the word very casually now.

-Yeah, they do.

And anything that's a little bit wacky is somehow surreal.

But, of course, there was rather more to it than that.

It wasn't just about unlocking the subconscious

and seeing the world in novel and peculiar ways.

It wasn't just about the irrational.

But they saw it as a sort of revolutionary, um...

way of not just looking at the world,

but unpacking how banal it was,

how, er...ludicrous and repressive society was.

They saw it as actually having an even more, um...

It was like a bomb for them.

They're very Ernst-like, these creatures.

I think I might have been spending too much time with Ernst lately.

HE CHUCKLES

Ernst had been drafted into the German army

in the First World War.

He'd been a founding member of the Dada movement in Cologne.

For Max Ernst, it wasn't just about rubbing leaves under a page.

Making art in this way was a revolutionary act.

When you are born into a period where so many...

events invite you to get revolted

over what is going on in the world

and be disgusted with it and so on,

it is absolutely natural that the work you produce is revolutionary.

The painting is the mirror of, er...time.

It must be mad

to have the true image of what time is.

Those subversive undertones are also there in the work

of the Belgian artist Rene Magritte.

It's easy to forget now that these readily-reproduced,

easy-on-the-eye images contain their own brand of revolution.

His paintings showed everyday things that we can all understand

and, at the same time, we know to be impossible.

He said, "The mind loves the unknown.

"It loves images whose meaning is unknown,

"since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown."

In this 1965 BBC documentary,

Magritte seems to enjoy playing the part of

the bowler-hatted businessman he so often painted,

but the presenter has rumbled his disguise.

He's a secret agent.

His object - to discredit bourgeois reality.

Like all saboteurs,

he avoids detection by dressing and behaving just like everybody else.

His keen eye for the absurd was drawn to the relationship

between objects, words and images.

His most famous painting of all, The Treachery of Images,

shows a picture of a pipe with the words written underneath

reminding you, "This is not a pipe, it's just a picture of a pipe".

Sometimes, he puts a picture in place of a word.

So this sentence reads, "I do not see the woman hidden in the forest".

At other points, he labels images

with the wrong words entirely.

By untethering objects from their labels,

or upsetting the rules of reality,

Magritte's work tries to undermine the very idea

that one can impose logic and order on the world.

It's a bit unsettling.

I enjoy Magritte's illusions and the games he plays with our mind.

It's just a pity the way he depicts women seems so stark.

Is there any place for me in an art movement

who thinks of women like this?

Ghislaine Wood is a curator who's also a bit uncomfortable

about Surrealism's seedy side.

I'm hoping she can show me how a good feminist can enjoy

a guilt-free relationship with Surrealism.

The difficulty with a lot of Surrealism in its earliest phase

was that it was very male-dominated and it was very patriarchal.

And a number of the male Surrealists had problems with that,

as well as a number of the women.

There has to be a bit of licence, I think, for the historical period, as well.

-Oh, sure, sure.

-That perhaps feminism as we understand it now

didn't really exist then.

For many of the Surrealists, women become a conduit to something else.

-Yeah.

-And women were perceived as being closer to nature,

closer to this idea of childhood,

these ideas that really fascinated the Surrealists.

And that's why women are such a common subject matter.

In some respects, you could argue

that women ARE the subject matter of Surrealism.

And I think one of the most interesting subject matters,

certainly in the late '30s, is the idea of the mannequin.

So, for instance, here,

we've got Andre Masson's Mannequin

from the Surrealist Exposition in Paris in 1938,

which was this extraordinary event

where 16 of the Surrealist men all chose a kind of mannequin

and then dressed it up, um...

-you know, sort of created objects from mannequins...

-Yeah.

..that were very different

and were really sort of seen as being quite shocking at the time.

In fact, Man Ray talked about them as women and them being raped

and violated by the Surrealist men.

She looks like she's actually gagged or something here.

She's got a scarf or something around her mouth.

She is, yeah, she's gagged and her head is put into a cage.

In some respects, it's the ultimate image of objectification.

It is quite extraordinary. There's a sort of, you know,

quite feminine moment of putting the pansy over the mouth.

So very erotic, you know, the idea of the mouth being an erotic zone.

But it was one of the most powerful images from that mannequin alley

and I think, really, did much to establish

the mannequin as the ultimate sort of Surrealist object.

And then, of course, it moves on into much more

disturbing territory with someone like Hans Bellmer

who, of course, um...dismembers the mannequins,

-puts them together in all sorts of new ways.

-They just become composite parts.

Yeah. And with very disturbing sort of overtones of violence,

um...eroticisation and also, of paedophilia, as well.

-Very often, these are children's...

-Yeah.

Um...you know, this mannequin wears children's shoes.

I mean, they are very disturbing, Bellmer's.

But I don't think we can be too judgmental

about it being done for titillation.

I think they were very bravely showing the inner workings

of their mind without editing it.

I think...

-Yeah.

-You know, when you do have...

When one has sexual fantasies, quite often,

you only think of a part of a body and the head doesn't exist

because it's not with the person, it's...

You know, in the unconscious, it can be completely objectified.

And so, they were showing for the first time,

that reality of the inner mind.

Yeah. I think that's very true.

I think they were trying to get to, you know,

an essential representation of unconscious thoughts,

um...no matter how disturbing that might be.

Of course, women weren't just there

as representations of unconscious thought.

They were accepted into the movement as artists.

Did they get accepted into the movement via the route of muse,

then mistress before they are taken seriously as a painter?

Can they come in as a painter, or a sculptor or a photographer,

or is it like, "Oh, my girlfriend's really good".

Well, it's a bit of both, actually.

Someone like Meret Oppenheim is really interesting,

from that point of view because obviously, she's this,

you know, fantastic sort of model for Man Ray.

A very beautiful woman who was photographed by him

in a number of different shoots, but this one in the printing press

is one of the most famous and extraordinary.

The handle of the printing press is at her very sex centre, isn't it?

It is, it is, yes.

Almost disguising it, but at the same time,

encouraging you to look at it.

Here she is at the printing press and yet she herself

is what is covered with ink, as though she is the subject here

of a work of art, rather than creating a work of art.

But, of course, she then went on and became

a very important Surrealist artist in her own right.

And most famously produced the fur-covered teacup,

which is one of THE most iconic Surrealist objects ever created.

And it was exhibited in the first Surrealist object exhibition

in Paris in 1936.

And it is an extraordinary work because it is so powerful.

It's an extraordinary erotic object

and kind of comes to represent the idea of woman.

Of course, the fur-covered spoon is put into the cavity,

it penetrates the cavity of the teacup.

The teacup, as you put it to mouth, is like, you know,

touching a woman's, you know...

-Fanny.

-Fanny. Exactly.

So, you know, it's this object that works in all sorts of

extraordinary ways and created by a woman.

Oppenheim spoke later on about where she got her inspiration.

Wherever it came from, Meret Oppenheim made some

striking and extraordinary examples of Surrealist sculpture.

The idea of making sculpture from found objects

was not a Surrealist invention,

but they applied their ideas of chance

and the juxtaposition of incongruous things to the art of the readymade.

As early as 1921,

Man Ray had begun making sculptures with combinations of things.

I pick something which in itself has no meaning at all,

but I combine it with a second element.

In the early days in Paris when I first came over and I passed by

a hardware shop and I saw a flag iron in the window, I said,

"There's an object which is almost invisible -

"maybe I could do something with that."

What could I do is to add something in it that was provocative,

so I got a box of tacks and glued on a row of tacks to it,

to make it useless, as I thought.

But nothing is really useless.

You can always find a use even for the most extravagant object.

I disregard completely the aesthetic quality of the object.

I'm against craftsmanship.

They say the world is full of wonderful craftsmen,

but there are very few practical dreamers.

'To make my own Surrealist object,

'I've picked one of the most practical dreamers I know -

'the writer and improvisation teacher John-Paul Flintoff.'

The horns are quite phallic, aren't they?

There's a lot of power in that thing.

This is very powerful, the whole thing.

'We've come to the Surrealists' old stomping ground.'

Oh, whoa!

'The flea markets north of Paris.'

Oh, look - this is good.

-A mechanism for making a thing happen.

-Oh!

-More things go in.

It's the reverse of what you expect. They don't fall out.

Really feeling the letters. I've got to have some letters.

I think letters are really important.

The power of the Surrealist objects

is often in their surprising combination

of the domestic and the wild,

making everyday things into objects of threat or desire.

It's perfect, and you can unscrew all this and screw other things on!

-Quarante-trois. Quarante-trois.

-Conclu.

-Ha-ha-ha!

-Yes!

Look at that. Just look at that! You know what that is.

-It's not difficult to work out.

-Look, what is this?

-I can't think!

Is this speaking to you at all?

HE LAUGHS Oh, look - more ladies!

Oh, lots of ladies.

-Great implement of torture.

-It's great, isn't it?

If that had our doorknobs on it, it would be a face enclosed by...

It's so good, actually.

It's so good.

Look, we've got to make something with all these things we've bought.

-Let's do it.

-OK. This looks like a good, empty space.

No-one will mind if we start assembling this stuff here.

Are you happy with the ladies being like this?

Yeah, I think they look like they're having a really nice time.

-I'd like to break the plate inside the handbag.

-Go on, then.

That's it. That's what we want. Little bits.

You know what, I'm actually getting sort of carried away,

-in a funny way now.

-Yeah, I'm really enjoying this.

-Are you feeling that as well?

-Totally.

Whether you make anything good or not, it's not really the point.

'Man Ray thought the same.'

I've never been able to finish a detective story

because I don't give a hag who was the murderer.

Oh, no. It doesn't interest me at all.

It's the process -

the mental process that's involved that interests me.

Process was key to them.

Max Ernst wrote later about how difficult it was at the start

for painters and sculptors to find ways of working

that fitted Breton's vision of Surrealism.

For some, the answer came

in literally taking a knife to the everyday -

cutting it into new visions of the world.

In the early '20s,

Ernst's fellow Dada artist Hannah Hoch made collages of images

and texts from the mass media

as a tool to critique the German Weimar government.

Ernst had developed his own knack of combining found images

from encyclopaedia, department store catalogues and popular novels

to create an unsettling world that was grounded in the familiar

but rendered new and strange.

Like found sculpture, his collages

worked to disrupt hierarchy and logic.

The images from high and low culture were mixed up together,

all cut loose from their original meaning.

He invented the idea of a sort of collage novel.

The last of these, Une Semaine de Bonte - A Week Of Kindness -

is a favourite of the English conceptual artist, John Stezaker,

who's built his own work around collage from found photographs.

I had a postcard collection ever since I was a young teenager,

and when I started to find film stills in the mid '70s,

it was obvious, I had these two collections -

to put a postcard on top of the film still seemed absolutely magical.

It was a moment in which I suddenly thought, "A-ha! Yes!

"It works perfectly."

What do you think Ernst is trying to do in Une Semaine de Bonte?

Do you think it's something about...he was taking

Edwardian and Victorian imagery from prints and stuff

and by cutting it up, was he trying to cut up the old world order

-and create something new?

-I imagine they probably were.

So they come from a world that was before he was born,

and I find that...

I'm attracted in a similar way to the 1940s,

the world before I was born,

and I think there is an interest in old or obsolete images

which relates to it belonging to a world you haven't experienced.

But it's just before so you're always curious about it.

There's definitely something Oedipal about it. I think you're right.

I think it is about tearing up the world order.

Funnily enough, I hardly ever dream.

I know all these people say,

"Oh, you mean you don't remember your dreams."

After a spell in hospital

I found I was having these incredibly intense dreams,

and these were the response in a sense

to this new power of the dream,

and somehow the dream world and the cinema world

started to kind of merge with one another again, and I started...

Funnily enough, it was kind of re-excited...

re-animated my interest in Surrealism

because of that connection.

Do you see the dream world as real

as what we think of as the real world?

I think it's probably more real.

-You're a true Surrealist, then!

-Perhaps I am!

Cos that's what they did.

That's what surreality means - it means super real.

It means as real as anything else.

I like the idea of being a sub-realist, somehow.

Going beneath reality.

It wasn't just found images that appealed to them,

but from the very beginning, the Surrealists used the camera

as a tool to unsettle you from the comfort of your own perceptions.

In a similar way to Magritte, they wanted you to see that the world

you think you're living in isn't so solid, either,

and it's already full of strange and marvellous things.

Arno Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer

who is still finding ways

to use his camera to reveal impossible images taken from life.

The most surreal things are attached somehow to photography.

When you see something that you haven't seen before,

the first expression inside you is one of astonishment and shock.

Ah, it's really come out, hasn't it?

Yeah.

-This is all white.

-Yeah.

So it's right to my feet. I don't see the dock at all.

So many of those great Surrealist women went from muse to model

to maker of work in their own right, so I might as well give it a go.

-Do you want my coat off for the drawing purpose?

-Er...

I mean, yeah, that might be better. Yeah, that's better.

Yeah. Terrific. OK.

Photography is to show us the truth.

Reality is much more inventive than we are.

We invent out of what we know.

The photograph shows us what we don't know.

What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera.

BIRDSONG

OK. I'm going to fire from here...

CLICK

-Great. OK.

-Hm-mm.

-Are we done?

-Yeah, we're done.

You know, I might put some clothes on!

THEY LAUGH

-There is a sauna in there, if you want to...

-Oh, is there? Right.

-Yeah.

-I don't know where I'm going!

-More white. You can see the drawings.

-Oh, yeah!

-Oh, it really works!

-It worked.

And we have the drawing at this stage,

where we can see the little cartoon character.

-It's my inner child, isn't it?

-Yeah, that's the child.

SHE LAUGHS

The greatest affinity to Man Ray,

for me, is in his desire to see something new.

Man Ray had developed a technique which he called the Rayograph,

named after himself,

where he placed the objects directly onto the photographic paper.

The Surrealists admired the beauty

of these images produced by relying on random chance.

So it's going to be a Rayograph...

This is wire, cos he likes wire. Wire.

It would rattle a little bit like that, lift some of it up

so that some of it is out of focus, some of it's in focus...

That's beautiful.

Wired out of magnifying glass, right in there,

and we have this lovely Italian nutcracker here.

We can put it right into the magnifying glass.

See what happens to her.

And, er, there could be this sort of a triangle there,

just like...something. And we'll take the match...

HE STRIKES MATCH

That's the exposure.

Now we take all these things off and we lost the picture,

can never get it back the same way.

I'm going to use my bare hands, cos this is real primitive stuff.

And now the whole paper will be... Have a black edge, certainly.

-Something's coming.

-Yep. Oh, it's coming up.

There she is, so there's the Rayograph.

I love the wire going out of focus...

Oh, no, it's not... It's the magnifying glass - it's wonderful.

Yeah.

So we take that out of here... I'll just put it right here.

And now we can put the light on already. It doesn't really matter.

And of course,

you have the opportunity of doing these kinds of things.

-He was a master of these edges, not just the centre.

-Yeah.

As well as stills photography,

Man Ray was also experimenting with film.

In this 1923 film Le Retour a la Raison - Return To Reason -

he extended his Rayograph technique to the moving image.

He sprinkled salt and pepper

onto one piece of film, and pins onto another!

But the most radical piece of Surreal cinema

would come from a new direction.

Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali had been college friends.

Neither of them had ever made a film before,

but both were desperate to break into the tight-knit Surrealist gang.

They set out to make a piece of cinema that would match

what they knew the Surrealists liked - random chance and dreams.

They tried to make their film a collage of dream-like images

and irrational associations deliberately without a story,

using title cards to jump back and forth in time

and disrupt any possibility of it making sense.

The film premiered in this cinema in Paris in June 1929.

The great and the good of the Paris art world were there,

including Le Corbusier,

Picasso and Gala Eluard, who would later become Gala Dali.

MUSIC PLAYS

Luis Bunuel said that when this film first showed,

he was behind the projection screen with his pockets full of stones,

ready to throw them at the audience if they hated the film!

But much to his disappointment, they quite liked it!

We are meaning-making creatures.

When we are presented with a collection of disjointed things,

our minds will always bridge the gaps.

Even these art students that we showed the film to today

couldn't help but try to make sense of it.

There were definitely underlying threads and themes that went

along with the whole thing.

Kind of reflects the way that spring and winter

are a balance of life and death.

-I think it's about love.

-OK!

-Yeah.

I wasn't quite sure what to make of all the different scenes,

but I was looking for threads.

Other than that, it was just... gobsmacked and confused,

but I did enjoy it.

Whatever its successes and failures as a piece of cinema,

the film certainly succeeded on winning Bunuel and Dali

their place in the Surrealist fold.

After the premiere, they attended the Surrealist daily meetings

at the cafe or at Breton's studio.

One of the striking things about how to be a Surrealist

is that you can't do it on your own!

The group was tremendously important to the early Surrealists.

They met every day,

they shared their experience of their unconscious with each other,

and I know from being a member of similar groups,

albeit psychotherapy groups,

just how intense and bonding that experience can be.

Breton dealt with differences by chucking out whoever

he thought transgressed Surrealist ideals.

He tried to police Surrealism in so many ways!

He said, "You can't design for the ballet,

"you can't paint shit on trousers, you can't be a homosexual,

"you can't take pictures of his wife, you can't be a Catholic..."

He wanted to control their politics,

their sexuality, their religion.

But in the end, the big "can't" was that you can't police Surrealism.

Hear that, Breton? You can't police Surrealism.

What had begun as the outpourings

of the unconscious mind of the artist -

a series of experiments and processes -

expanded into a dazzling mix of styles and techniques.

All under the umbrella of Surrealism.

When the Surrealists came to London

for the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936,

the Great British public didn't know quite what to make of them.

The world of dreams is a strange world,

which most of us visit only in our sleep.

The whole aim of Surrealism is to explore this realm

and to bring it into relation with our daily life.

Dali turned up with a deep-sea diving suit,

all the better to descend into the subconscious mind,

and the whole thing nearly ended in disaster when he tried to

deliver a lecture from inside the suit and nearly suffocated.

He was only rescued at the last minute by a poet with a spanner.

Later, of course, he would become the grand showman of Surrealism.

Indeed, at one point, he was arguably the most famous artist

in the world, and he was rarely modest about it.

Dali chose to execute his paintings in a hyperrealistic style.

He was once a fervent believer in the artistic possibilities

of tapping into the unconscious.

This work, The Metamorphosis Of Narcissus,

was the first example of his approach

to painting the unconscious mind.

You know when you see a paper bag and at first it isn't a paper bag -

it's an incredibly detailed cat, and you're absolutely certain

it's a cat - you think, "Oh! It's a cat - it's about to get run over!"

And then your mind does a bit more processing and it's a paper bag...

We've all had that thing when we see something,

we're sure it's that thing or that person, and then it isn't.

Dali was really interested in this first impression we get,

which might be our lasting impression, but it's the one

we see through this lens of paranoia,

and he called this way of seeing his "paranoiac-critical method".

What he's done here is like two images that look very, very similar

but they're actually depicting completely different things.

One's a thumb and a finger holding an egg with a narcissus coming up,

and the other is the actual figure of Narcissus himself

looking into the pond, but they look the same.

It's trying to convey to the viewer that he wanted you to see

that one shape could be both things or many things, indeed.

It is showing us the unconscious,

not because the movement of the painting or the brush strokes

is an unconscious process like it is in automatic drawing,

but because he's showing you the tricks your mind plays on you.

In the summer of 1938,

he took this painting with him when he went to see Sigmund Freud.

Freud wrote afterwards in a letter to a friend,

"I really have to thank you for the introduction which brought me

"yesterday's visitors, for until then,

"I was inclined to look upon the Surrealists, who have apparently

"chosen me as their patron saint, as absolute cranks.

"The young Spaniard, however, with his candid and fanatical eyes,

"and his undeniable technical mastery,

"has made me reconsider my opinion."

These enormous efforts they were making to overthrow the conventions

of society and find a truth beyond our lived reality

had been taking place against a backdrop

of the rise of fascism in Europe.

At the end of the '30s,

Europe was becoming a pretty dangerous place,

especially if you were, in the eyes of the incoming Nazis,

a degenerate artist, so many of the Surrealists came to America,

especially here, New York.

JAZZ MUSIC

Art historian Robert Hobbs has written extensively about

the American art scene in the '40s.

How were the Surrealists received in America?

Well, the Surrealists came in several different groups,

but they were received exceedingly well.

Andre Breton came soon after Paris fell

and he was the great hope of Surrealism.

Max Ernst came over and he ended up marrying Peggy Guggenheim.

But mainly, the Surrealists mixed with very different circles

than the American artist,

and so they were well-accepted by collectors, you know,

any number of people in New York, er...but the young artists

-who were aspiring regarded them as old-fashioned.

-Uh-huh.

A bit fusty.

They regarded them as not the most current avant-garde, even though

the galleries and museums regarded them as the ruling avant garde.

While the European Surrealists were busy swanning around

at Peggy Guggenheim's parties, Breton's original ideas were being

taken up by a new wave of American artists.

I think when one looks at the abstract expressionists

in relation to the Surrealists,

one of the things that's very fascinating is the Americans

did go back to the very beginnings of Surrealism,

so rather than picking up Surrealism in the 1940s and saying,

we're going to continue with late Surrealism,

which they felt was out-of-date and old-fashioned,

as I've mentioned before,

they wanted to go back to the very beginnings of Surrealism

to create a truer, more authentic Surrealism,

and so the two really sprang from a common root, or common beginning.

While the next wave of modern art was borne in response to

Breton's ideas of pure psychic autonomism,

a lot of the innovations they'd made in image-making,

combinations of incongruous things,

putting objects in impossible settings, wordplay - indeed,

the whole iconography of that particular Surrealist style,

was adopted wholesale into the world of advertising.

Magritte had been an ad man in his time, and he understood the pleasure

there is in connecting the dots, in getting the joke.

What would Breton say today if he saw his ideas being used not

to unsettle us from our bourgeois reality,

but to sell credit cards?!

The funny thing is,

that these artists who tried to do everything they could

to disrupt established ideas and to tear up social conventions

were now mainstream celebrities.

First, it dissolves.

Happy bubbles, but dissolved bubbles.

Breton called Dali "Avida Dollars", an anagram of Salvador Dali, because

he seemed to have sold out and would do anything for American money.

..so those beautiful places will be beautiful again.

Alka-Seltzer is a work of art. Truly one of a kind, like a Dali.

Watching him later, this look-at-me eccentric,

it's hard to remember that he was once an earnest disciple

of the movement, and it's a shame that for many people,

the image of Surrealism has got reduced to

that weird Sunday supplement kind of sexy

and posters in teenage boys' bedrooms,

because that is really the least interesting part of the whole thing.

I think because of what has lingered of Surrealism, you know,

the paintings of Magritte and Dali,

people think that IS Surrealism, and it isn't - it's more than that.

It's about discovering the unconscious.

What was amazing when I set up the pop-up bureau

was people off the street

and how quickly they got to their inner realities and what

they found out about themselves, you know, just in five minutes.

It was incredible. So I imagine it was pretty mind-blowing

for the Surrealists when they discovered similar things.

I'm thrilled by what I've found out about the Surrealists.

It isn't a style.

It is a philosophy,

and it's a philosophy that we might go back to from time to time to help

us with our own discovering of our own outer lives and our inner lives.

The Surrealists tried to tap into that huge wellspring

of creativity that we have in our unconscious minds, and they

did that in reaction to the crisis of world politics of 100 years ago.

I can't help but feel that this art form, borne of troubled times,

is actually relevant to where we are today.

Looking around, it's no wonder

that so many people think the world is a little surreal.