Some midmorning gardening today provided me with a captive, and generally photosynthesizing, audience. This is the intro to a talk I gave to the potatoes, onions, peas, peppers, tomatoes, grapevines, plum tree, weeds and an attentive spider on the topic of my summer research.
…My research interests have been varied over the years, and I find that I am interested to learn more about any topic. Right now, however, in my independent work, I am trying to get closer to the bedrock on the topic of surrealist painting. Surrealism fascinates me, and it has since childhood. It is appealing to a wide demographic of consumers of art–especially considering the many alternatives in two dimensional art objects–example: see basically anything non-surrealist for comparison, but for starters, a realist of the Renaissance (Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holorernes”) vs. abstracted work of Alice Bailly (Dans Le Chapelle) vs. non-representational/meditative work of contemporary painter Barbara Kreft (Italian Turquoise) vs. religious and other commemorative work of the middle ages (see Bayeux Tapestry)–In my experience, persons who consider (and declare) themselves peripheral to or even outside the art world, are able to vibe with surrealism more than any of the aforementioned styles or movements in visual art.
Why is this? What is this about?
A surrealist painting, through many elements including subject matter, composition and color, often mystifies and entangles the viewer. Space is created adhering to some of the laws of physics, (where gravity and light can act on surfaces per the norm) while other elements are used to bend and even break these laws (textures and light value morph the images of objects into impossibilities). A child, myself in the past, who is first beginning to understand operations of physical space, is often fascinated by the boundary between possible and impossible–and surrealism appeals to this interest in adults as well.
Surrealism, at a very basic level, achieves its purpose when it exposes multiple paradigms at once. Of course, this is the thesis of a doctoral dissertation, but on the surface, my being a liminal creature in many ways makes this exposure of particular importance. I wonder about the ways in which people can interpret situations, words and images and how contradicting ideas can occur simultaneously.
This leads to a barrage of questions about the makers of such works–and I am almost prepared to posit that this quality, liminality, is tightly bound to many makers of surrealist work. It might be too easy to prove this, however, because so few, if any people in history can be considered to be completely integrated within the mainstream of whatever group they are a part of… at least, that is my secret hope.
My main goal of this summer’s research, or the remaining portion of it, is to understand more about women in surrealism. Within surrealism, a particular image of femininity emerges that is closely connected with the writings of Jung and Freud–painting becomes an exploration of the unconscious, the dream world, and women are sort of shoved into particular categories, regarding sexuality and wish fulfillment, castration, all sorts of this and that which makes the female surrealist painter an anomaly–perhaps, but then… perhaps not. It matters to investigate the experiences of female surrealist painters and to clarify their approaches to the production of surrealist images–were they making something that was a part of the tradition? Was surrealism contrary to womanness at the time or did the two shape each other in other ways? And how was masculinity expressed through surrealist painting? Also, in what ways did gender play no role at all? Is this a dialogue that needs to be addressed in the discussion of surrealism, or did were other factors more important in the work of this type? How can this discussion be complicated by race, class and political climates?
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