3x23
Such an interesting morning, just when I thought I was done with the Dream / Surrealism thread. The day began with additions to my dear friend Daniel Heïkalo's Flickr stream, which included these 5 images:
These days it's not surprising that a casual viewer would ascribe the images to an AI like DALL-E, but no no no... Daniel is a master and indeed a genius of digital collage, and the Intelligence is absolutely not "artificial", and it matters ... both in terms of the recognition of his skills and the subtlety of understanding that they express.
Daniel's images are Dream-like, certainly, and inspecting their details led me to realizing that I was hazy about just how collage fitted into Surrealism, and how the technique found its way into "modern" art. I looked for what Amazon might offer, was repelled by the schlock and the prices, and so I got Drawing Surrealism (Leslie Jones et al., 2012) from the shelves, and spent a couple of morning hours down that rabbit hole. Here's some of what I found, starting with Dada and then flooding the Surrealism that succeeded Dada:
...collage embodied the populist and countercultural sentiments of surrealism... (13)Aragon's 1930 monograph, for a March 1930 exhibition at Galerie Goemans (which closed immediately afterwards): Exposition de collages : Arp, Braque, Dali, Duchamp, Ernst, Gris, Mirò, Magritte, Man-Ray, Picabia, Picasso, Tanguy...And it all stated with a footnote: Breton's directive to simply trace images found in one's dreams suggests the extraction of volition from the creative process... automatic drawings done by Robert Desnos while in a trance...
Jean Arp:
...I tore up drawings and carelessly smeared paste [colle] over and under them. If the ink dissolved and ran, I was delighted. I stuck my collages together with a wad of newsprint instead of pressing them carefully with blotting paper, and if a crack developed, so much the better; as far as I wqas concerned, it made my work more authentic. I had accepted the transcience, the dribbling away, the brevity, the impermanence, the fading, the withering, the spookishness of existence... (19) [the essence of Dream, right?]Arp's semiautomaticism suggested an attempt to bypass the conscious mind, and it eventually became the actual modus operandi of many surrealists. (19)...Ernst's collages soon caught the attention of Breton and other soon-to-be surrealists. According to Breton,
I well remember the day when I first set eyes on them: Tzara, Aragon, Soupault and myself all happened to be at Picabia's house at the very moment when these collages arrived from Cologne, and we were all filled immediately with unparalleled admiration... (23)Disorientation achieved through the unlikely juxtaposition of everyday images became a primary visual strategy for the surrealists, and its origin stems from the possibilities of collage. Although the invention of collage is widely attributed to Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in their synthetic cubist compositions first executed in 1912, Ernst is credited for adapting the technique to surrealist ends... Ernst used images cut from illustrated catalogs as independent elements, creating odd, disorienting scenarios... (24)One rainy day in 1919, in a town on the Rhine, my excited gaze is provoked by the pages of a printed catalogue. The advertisements illustrate objects relating to anthropological, microscopical, psychological, mineralogical, and palaeontological research. Here I discover the elements of a figuration so remote that its very absurdity provokes in me a sudden intensification of my faculties of sight — a hallucinatory succession of contradictory images, double, triple, multiple, superimposed upon each other with the persistence and rapidity characteristic of amorous memories and visions of somnolescence. These images, in turn, provoke new planes of understanding. They encounter an unknown —new and nonconformist. By simply painting or drawing it suffices to add to the illustration a color, a line, a landscape foreign to the objects represented—a desert, a sky, a geological section, a floor, a single straight horizontal expressing the horizon and so forth. These changes, no more than docile reproductions of what is visible within me, record a faithful and fixed image of my hallucination. They transform the banal pages of advertisement into dramas which reveal my most secret desires. (Max Ernst) (24) [and now go back and look at Daniel's images again!]..."It is not the glue that makes the collage" (Ernst). Desnost: "...new territory, a conquered colony in which the freedom to dream has subdued the imperialism of the already seen, has been won from memory by the imagination." (40)
This notion of creating a new surreality from the 'already seen' was a fundamental principle of surrealism rooted in dreams and Freudian analysis. Surrealist collage, glued together from the residue of 'reality', epitomised this notion in visual terms. (40)
Surreal Collage from civitai.com
Surrealist Techniques: Collage Charles Cramer and Kim Grant