SURREALISM; UNDERSTANDING THE UN-UNDERSTANDABLE.

So I finally got myself together and headed out to our lovely Gallery of Modern Art to finally check out the famed Surrealism: Poetry of Dreams display that was trouncing past my sub-conscious for the past few weeks. I’ve been desperately wanting to check it out for a while now, and I finally snagged the chance last Wednesday. I assumed that you had to be in the right state of mind to go to one of these exhibitions – and it was best to go by yourself if you really wanted to take your time – and I was right.

Firstly, I realised that I never really understood Surrealism and quite frankly, I still don’t particularly understand it. From what I’ve read, heard and fervently Wikipedia’d, Surrealism was formed in the spirit of revolt that characterised the European avant-garde inthe 1920s. Just like the Dada movement, in which some of them had participated, these poets and artists denounced the rationalist arrogance of the late nineteenth century, which had been halted in its tracks by the First World War. However, rejecting Dadaism, the surrealists broke away to proclaim the official existence of their own movement in 1924.

So, wandering about the gallery display, with a brochure in one hand and clicky-inky pen in the other, I scrawled notes frantically. To my surprise I found out that, dominated by André Breton, Surrealism was, at first, essentially a literary movement. The surrealist artists, “introduced the theory of the liberation of desire through the invention of techniques that aimed to reproduce the mechanisms of dreams.”