“Scarred Futures, Jagged Dreams”

by Martin Dege

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

Surrealism, a hundred years after Breton’s manifesto, no longer needs to announce its revolt against rationalism. The revolt has been lived, metabolized, absorbed into pop culture and design. What remains is something different: not the bright scandal of dream-images but the persistence of desire itself. And desire, as Lacan reminds us in Seminar VI, is never what we think it is. It is the leftover, the part of us that language cannot grasp, the part that slips through every demand and every promise of satisfaction. The Pratt students who submitted works for Surrealism Tomorrow: The Next 100 Years do not so much imitate surrealist styles as they stage this remainder. Their surrealism is not decorative or nostalgic but restless, jagged, and torn by the fractures of desire. This is why their work forces us to read it psychoanlytically: it offers, in raw and electrified form, glimpses of how the unconscious imagines its own future.

Take Wars Within the Scars / Who is the target. Here the scar in the earth is both literal and dreamlike: a trench-city, endlessly rebuilt and destroyed, haunted by generational trauma. The artist’s great-grandfather survived Hiroshima, and the dream becomes a theater of repetition, an impossible attempt to master the real of nuclear catastrophe. Lacan tells us that desire appears where things go wrong, in the slippage between demand and its satisfaction, in the misfiring of language and fantasy. This artwork is precisely such a misfire: the scar that will not close, the baby ripped from the mother’s arms, the cosmic twinkling of explosions mistaken for stars. The unconscious here does not dream of peace or of redemption; it dreams of survival in the rubble, desire persisting as remainder. This is not only surrealism reborn; it is surrealism scarred by the twentieth century, refusing to let trauma be domesticated into coherent narrative. It tells us that the surrealism of the future will not be playful escape but confrontation with the leftover of history, the nuclear real that still courses through our bloodlines.

Contrast this with Hush, This Is Just a Dream, where dream logic is taken at its word. The work folds in and out of itself, staging images that collapse even as they appear. Lacan describes dreams as sites where desire stages itself, not necessarily through the fulfillment of a wish but through its derailment. This piece embodies that derailment: it seduces us into following its imagery only to leave us stranded in irresolvable sequences. The effect is not disappointment but exhilaration. The work captures exactly what Lacan calls the “desire to desire” — the restless compulsion to keep wanting, even when nothing is delivered. In this sense, the dream-image here is not a scene of fulfillment but a generator of lack, and it is in that lack that surrealism finds its renewed energy.

A similar disturbance of the gaze structures Woman on Canvas. At first glance, it might look like a traditional nude framed within painterly conventions. But the frame is part of the assault: it exposes the figure as sexualized, contained, brutalized, while the foliage beyond the frame suggests a retreat into psychic elsewhere. The crawling, decapitated head turns the gaze back on us, forcing recognition of violence and of the obscene underside of representation. We are always caught in the gaze of the Other; our fantasy is never only ours, it is always staged for another’s look. What this painting achieves is a short-circuiting of that economy. The viewer expects erotic display but is given decapitation instead, forced to confront the desire to look and the shame embedded in it. Here surrealism does not only twist reality; it twists the gaze itself. It asks us whether, in the future, surrealism might not be about dreamscapes at all but about dislocating vision, fracturing the ocular regime that still dominates our culture.

If fantasy props up desire, as Lacan insists, then An Irregular Dream I is one such prop violently stripped of its ornamental polish. The work refuses completion, presenting a feminist geometry that is broken, irregular, intentionally askew. Fantasy usually provides coherence, a frame that allows the subject to go on desiring. But here coherence is refused. What is left is the exposure of the fracture itself, the impossibility of wholeness. Desire appears not as smooth continuity but as jagged insistence. Surrealism, in this register, is less about the liberation of imagination than about the exposure of its wounds.

Even the whimsical works, like Can a toucan can-can?, do not escape this logic. The bright colors, the playful metamorphosis of bird and dancer, at first seem to restore surrealism to its childlike joy. But the can-can dance is historically a site of exploitation, of women’s bodies displayed for entertainment. By inserting the toucan — decorative, exotic, caged — the work reopens that wound. It is fantasy turned inside out, exposing its complicity with oppression. What seems at first an innocent pun is revealed as social critique: surrealism here insists that the unconscious is not private dream but collective history, that even play is scarred by structures of domination. The punk tone is not in the surface humor but in the refusal to let the joke remain harmless.

Finally, consider the monumental installation Six sides, Two worlds, No truth…. This piece immerses the viewer in a cube where inside and outside, purity and rawness, geometry and earth, clash. It stages alienation: the subject forced to funnel its being through language, always losing something in the process. Inside the cube, one is offered pure white space, seemingly unburdened. Outside, the raw bamboo roots and rough walls remind us of the real, the unassimilable. The installation makes palpable the split at the heart of desire — the clean fantasy of freedom versus the stubborn remainder of material existence. That there is “no truth” is exactly the point: desire has no final object, no ultimate satisfaction. It can only circle endlessly around its lost object, propping itself up with fantasies, installations, dreams, scars.

What all these works tell us is that surrealism in the future will not be about the unconscious as a hidden treasure to be revealed. It will be about the unconscious as fracture, as leftover, as lack. Desire is the metonymy of being — always shifting, always pointing elsewhere, never graspable. The students at Pratt have understood this, perhaps intuitively: their works are not harmonious visions but fractured metonymies. They reveal that the unconscious of today’s young artists is shaped not only by sexuality and repression but by war, ecological collapse, systemic oppression, and the relentless demand to perform. Their surrealism is a surrealism of survival, of broken fantasies, of desires that know themselves as unfulfillable.

If surrealism has a future, it lies in this refusal of closure. The works in Surrealism Tomorrow insist that the unconscious is not a reservoir of stable symbols but a restless generator of cracks and wounds. They show us that desire, in Lacan’s sense, is structurally unsatisfiable, and yet it is precisely in this unsatisfiability that art finds its electricity. Surrealism tomorrow will not be glossy, not be resolved, not be utopian. It will be scarred, punk, jagged, unfinished. It will be the persistence of desire where things go wrong. And that, more than anything else, is what makes it alive.