“Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, and Hope: Comment on Surrealism Tomorrow”

by Leo Coleman

Professor and Chair, Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute

The artworks in Surrealism Tomorrow bring to mind a lot of fragmentary images and, naturally enough, evoke memories of classic works in the surrealist tradition. But these works, together, also provoke more bodily responses, even feelings. As I viewed them, both when on display at Pratt Institute and in this online format, I felt a push and a pull, an estrangement and involvement, an impulse to touch and tell stories. This art is uncanny, ambiguous, perhaps discomfiting, and invites interaction while often disrupting easy interpretation. Some of it can be worn, some sat upon, some played or physically explored, but none of it is simply familiar, already known from the ordinary world of objects and images. Such responses tell us we are in the presence of surrealism. Furthermore, these works reflect on and rework the deep historical kinship between psychoanalysis and surrealism, especially in their unexpected juxtapositions and displacements, images of bodily fragmentation and reassembly, and discomfiting ambiguities of both space and species, while often evoking the remainders/reminders of traumatic experiences. They explore psychological questions of self-knowledge, bodily self-awareness, and the intersubjective dynamics of desire. I want to focus my appreciation of this diverse, forward-looking body of work on these two issues: their evident relation to surrealism as a style or genre, across varied media and often innovative uses of form, and how they offer a distinctive rendering of and response to psychoanalytic understandings of the unconscious mind. Their psychological inquiries are, I think, all conducted in a hopeful key, notwithstanding the wide range of subjects and tones in play, from the dark and brooding to the playful and even whimsical.

To be clear about where I’m coming from, I’m not a professional student of art or psychology; I’m an anthropologist who studies political bonds and corporate bodies, and how social solidarities and interdependencies are formed and reshaped through law, technology, and ritual. But I’ve long been inspired by the broad tradition of surrealist art to think in new ways about mutual, affective relations between persons and things, and the political obligations–and risks–that are imposed by unconscious desires and bodily needs. I think of surrealism as an enduring mode of critical inquiry, an idiom for depicting and provoking experiences of relation and dependence, our deep, human entanglement with other minds and meanings, and the fraught ambiguity of all boundaries and categories. Consider, to take one example, Louise Bourgeois’s late vitrines and cages, with their piles of soft, pillow-like forms and objects suspended by thin rods–a version of contemporary surrealism that I see echoed throughout this exhibit. The materials list for one of these works by Bourgeois, Untitled (2010), runs “Fabric, thread, rubber, stainless steel, wood and glass.” The wood and glass form an enclosure, like the frame of a painting, or the border of a doorway, or the limits of a strangely rectilinear body: defining and disclosing what is at once an interior–full of objects and “organs”–and a set of relations in its own right. In this interior, the stainless steel forms a plinth and a rod, a horizontal and a vertical support, while the rubber, fabric, and thread comprise both more or less legible objects (spools, cushions) arrayed upon them, and other forms that seem to exist in in-between states, not yet fully defined, clinging to the metal’s hard surfaces. This particular assembly refracts other objects in a museum, too, since the enclosure is also a display case, and a gallery or museum is one obvious context for it. This work is partly about the articulation and display of mute relations between things, an organic becoming; but it also provokes or resonates with a deeper yearning to know something that persists within meaning-making creatures in a world of signifying objects and neverending communication. This is something inhuman or object-like in our very psyche that forms an impediment, disrupts and distracts, binds and blinds, as we try to put words to and hence contain relations, experiences, and feelings. Surrealism, in some of its forms, is a method of putting that other thing that is also part of us on display, presenting it, making it knowable and meaningful.

What ties together all “surrealist” work, whether of yesterday, today, or tomorrow, is the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious that was pioneered by Sigmund Freud. Like that Bourgeois piece, the Freudian unconscious is not made up of distinct symbols with definite meanings, the sort of direct associations Freud found in popular dream books where image and import were laid out with clarity. It is full instead of traces, impressions of experiences and encounters that are, themselves, marked by their passage through language and interpretation, becoming obscured or distorted as they take their place in the mental record of an individual past. Indeed, Freud often described the qualities and workings of the unconscious using graphical metaphors, describing processes of inscription or marking and erasing (a great example of this is his little essay “Note on the ‘Magic Notepad’”).

What most sets the Freudian unconscious apart from other approaches to mind and psychological interiority, moreover, is a specific, double-sided claim about the impact of experience and ways of knowing: the unconscious is object-like in many ways, impassive and even inert (it is timeless, he says), but nevertheless, on his account it actively receives and reacts to existence and experience. Its special logic and activity can, thus, also be interpreted, known and grappled with, as it leaves its own traces in dreams, jokes, uncanny feelings, and art.

Freud’s elaborate accounting for what otherwise might be imagined to be a hidden, controlling, inner core of subjectivity or simple reflection of personal history, in terms instead of the communication between (outer) experience and (inner) meaning, where each of the terms in parentheses can be substituted for the other, helps emphasize that the psyche is plastic, subject to events, and yet at the same time it does not generate the kind of orderly stories we tell to give sequence and form to our lives. This unconscious is at once distinct from our ordinary conscious existence, its rhythms and knowledge, yet it is also in communication with our perceptions and interactions. It can be shocked or wounded by sharp impressions or violent encounters, but it does not react, forget, or recover in the same ways, evolving instead in other directions. This is one source of our contemporary notion of psychological trauma. And yet, Freud’s account of the unconscious and its workings is, still, hopeful. Freud’s notion of the unconscious is not a place of uncontrollable urges and evolved instincts, senseless and automatic reactions, or permanent wounds; one can indeed know oneself, even one’s deepest drives and most distant and formative experiences, and by so doing one can become less haunted by fear and anxiety, less subject to uncontrollable powers that exist beyond one’s grasp, whether wounding events, sinister motives, or despotic authorities. Freud’s formula for this hope is the phrase “where it was, I shall be.”

In their time, the original surrealists in Europe and elsewhere made great art working through the ideas they drew from Freud, reflecting a particular moment in the history of the human subject. They found visual and tactile means to evoke the pull of unconscious desire (especially as it was enticed by prohibition and transgression), played with symbolic substitutions and displacements, and created a visual language that treated metaphors and parapraxes as signs of unconscious thought, finding meaning in automatic marks, juxtapositions, and puns. They often exploited the effect of inversions or reversals, exposing insides that “ought” to remain hidden and revealing how shifts in scale or perspective change perceptions.

These sorts of procedures are evident across the works in Surrealism Tomorrow. Further, these works ask hard questions about the destructive force of that “ought” and the exclusions necessary for mastery through reason and consciousness. These young artists have devised creative ways of working with and reworking the surrealist tradition, in new times and in relation to new technologies and new kinds of personal and political experiences. But these works, taken together, are also curiously hopeful in a way that resonates with that original Freudian insight that the unconscious can be known and shared, its sources plumbed, its procedures known, its messages deciphered—even if this process does not automatically produce better relations or reveal only happy truths. These works offer the hope, as does psychoanalysis, of making better relationships with others and into the future by becoming more knowledgeable about what lies within us, the traces of both common and personal experiences that we bear, not only as the marks of our own individual histories but also as the impress of common things, experiences, and relations. These observations, finally, reaffirm the title of this collection. These works are potent indications of surrealism tomorrow–what we can yet learn from its methods and what it may become, as a genre and a style, as artists continue to explore its history and its durable insights.