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La révolution surréaliste no.13

Dead is the new Surrealism. A new automatism is the corpse reanimated. The dead made alive is Revolution.

A Necromancy of Surrealism...

Photograph of a Room: The Conceptual Potential for a Surrealist Continuum

The genesis of this necromancy came from reading Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-1945.
Chronicling the aptly named “époque des sommeils,” Ruth Brandon writes of the automatic investigations of André Breton and Philippe Soupalt:

“But for the moment, the only spirits he and Soupalt were interested in contacting were their own” (Brandon, 1999).

Thus, my investigation into the mediumship of my subconscious was born—a thanatotic collaborative with my own spirit.

By exploring contemporary research in neuroaesthetics and accepting our post-psychoanalytical understanding of the human mind, I posit that there is opportunity to appropriately update and expand upon the work spearheaded by the formal Surrealist movement. Moreover, I feel there is room for this to be done in a novel, yet historically accessible way; actualizing a soft destruction of perceptual reality within the viewer’s mind itself; approaching surreality with a conceptual artistic framework, reappropriating the trompe l'oeil—the aim of my singular photographic work, entitled: Photograph of a Room.

While the environs of the room pictured are honestly constructed, the focal objects are two-dimensional substrates in masonite hardboard, which have been painted in acrylic and gesso.

Photographed in-perspective, this trompe l’oeil exploits the visual gaps in human perception, and thus relinquishes the viewer of an objective reality. Its successful execution enacts a surrealism as it was defined by author and founding participant, Louis Aragon, in his 1926 novel- Paris Peasant:

“The vice named Surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image, or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation: for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe. And for each [person] there awaits discovery of a particular image capable of annihilating the entire Universe” (Aragon, 1926).

The revision and annihilation of one’s universe, or understanding thereof, lies in the suspension of trust within the viewer having been made aware of the painted objects. My argument is that by inspiring the question “what is real?” when one knows that they are looking at a photograph, but is unable to discern which elements are painted versus those that are honest constructions, is not as reductive as illusionism, but rather as complex as an intentional subversion of neuro-sensory relay in the domain of visual art, the purpose of which is to undermine the social power of reality.