Burrowed in the subconscious are instinctual drives repressed by society and conventional morality. There is little room left in our reality for a broad scope of fantasy; liberated from the confines of human existence. The unbinding of internal and external fantasy further acts as salvation from servitude and self-encagement. Sexuality, erotic desires and violence are all interlinked with psychoanalytic concepts of the mind in which Surrealist artists specifically sought to unyoke. Thought, human experience, and repressed desires are challenged by the notions of convulsive beauty, the uncanny and a rebuking of conventional reality. But who is to say we ever stop seeing our body as one that is fragmented?
The fetishization of dismemberment arguably serves as a reflection of one’s fragmented view of self. Founder and principal theorist of surrealism, André Breton analyzes in his Manifesto of Surrealism an apparition that he witnessed of what could best be described as the traumatized male body: a man cut in two. (Breton 21-22) This lucid dream experience he speaks of places fragmentation and dismemberment at the core of the movement alongside the subconscious-dream state. The image of a man split in half demonstrates the dual identity fundamental to Breton’s psychic automatism, and an early exploration into the psyche as a means of self-acknowledgement. He goes on in his manifesto:
“If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them - first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason.”
André Breton was one of many who advocated for the investigation on the notion of a bisected self. Sigmund Freud, a prominent influence on members of the Surrealist movement, was a central figure in exploring the splitting of consciousness, and that very relationship to conflict between sexual desire and social norms. Dreams, he argues are but leftovers of the day’s residue, images from one’s childhood, and a juxtaposition of randomized elements into imagery. The mind is divided between the conscious and unconscious, this division representing what he would call the repression barrier. (Freud 121-145)
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, known for his development on the concept of the gendered subject later on reinterpreted Freud’s theories of repression by mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy and while he was not contemporary to the work of the Surrealists, he is still a very important part of this tradition. He regards the function of what he calls the mirror-stage as a way to establish a relationship between an object and it’s reality. The mirror reflection in this context becomes that of a metaphor: you are the reflection in the mirror, yet that reflection only “reflects” you—it isn’t the whole you, more or less a fragment of you—a gestalt; an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted. (Lacan 620) Objective fulfilment in this sense, can never be found. This perpetual experience arguably acts as merely a temporal dialectic that projects one’s fragmentation unto reality. “A drama” he writes, “whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation. […] “the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality.” […] “This fragmented body—usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual. It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs.” (Lacan 3)
In self-taught painter Max Ernst’s, Die Anatomie Als Braut (1921) we view a poetically suggestive, anatomical depiction of the fragmented self, shown as a quasi-mechanical woman on a dissecting table.
Geometric forms and erotic elements of mechanics come together in what is otherwise known as, The Anatomy of The Bride. This early exploration of the subconscious seeks to parallel the manifestations of such as described by Freud. Ernst’s use of complex visual metaphors along with perplexing semantic and visual associations resemble the mechanics of processes such as condensation and displacement. Such mechanized processes are innate to Freud’s conceptions of “dreamwork” which functions by effectively transforming “the repressed thoughts of the unconscious into the manifest content of the dream” (Freud 43). The choice to use the medium of collage as material further fragments the content visually and equates a splintering of identity through a series of displacements. In his autobiographical piece, “Instantaneous Identity”, he writes:
“This exchange, which might be a broad flowing stream or a shattering stroke of lightning and thunder, I am tempted to consider the equivalent of that which, in classical philosophy, is called identity. I conclude, in transposing the thought of André Breton, that IDENTITY WILL BE CONVULSIVE OR WILL NOT EXIST. (Ernst 19)”
Ernst in his work upholds that fragmentation is in fact more natural than the belief that we are one, solid being. Much like the Surrealists sought to throw the shackles of conventionality in general, the movement specific term, Convulsive Beauty in which Ernst word-plays on, sought to throw contemporary notions of beauty by celebrating the transgressive power of images. In André Breton’s, Mad Love he offers the description: “Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic circumstantial or not at all.” The notion of convulsive beauty alongside objective chance are two components in what Breton terms, The Marvellous. The marvellous acts as a rupture in natural order, challenging rationality; to surrealists it is a project of reenchantment in a disenchanted world. (Foster 19) It is the negation of reality. The marvellous is evoked by replacement, aesthetic or otherwise and this supports the use of surrealist collage—a direct disorientation of subjectivity. (Foster 19-21 )
Max Ernst was not the only one to utilize the nature of collage to equate feelings of displacement. Artist Hannah Höch’s cut and paste collages, also known as the form she helped pioneer “photomontages” are an appropriation and combination of mass media imagery and texts that explore new territory. In Höch’s, Around a Red Mouth (1967) we view an assemblage of the anti-body that escapes visual reality and negates photographic, bodily difference.
The female body is disarranged, fragmented, retaining only traces of pictorial signifiers—transforming the female anti-body into an anti-photograph; effectively challenging roles of gender in 20th Century Germany. A pair of red lips float between textured terrain, red and white frills depict that of which could be clothing or folds of skin fill the page, twisting both the phallocentric and specular logic that articulates the social being of “woman” as “no-body.” (Rempel) Her early works started off as visual political critiques in search of freedom immune from manipulation of the state and later evolved into more of a sociological exploration in the mid 1930s—this is also when her work started to appear more surreal. Much like Ernst, through micro-focusing on specific aspects of the self, Hannah Höch places the viewer, as the interpreter of her work on the diversity of the female identity to question: emancipation, pleasure, the body, class, utopianism, identity, politics and so forth. Laura Rempel has to say in her essay on Höch:
“If representation feeds desire and constructs identity, can it not also steer, circumscribe, normalize, gender, and dichotomize both desire and identity? If there is an inequality between who looks and who is looked at- between who desires and who is desired, who is centred and who is pulled apart —what superpower determines and defines the sexual and psychic roles that pivot back and forth from the register of the eye?” (Rempel 153)
What role do representations of the body have in reaffirming what we see and how we feel? To what extent is a vision of bodily difference captured by the camera, or even the artist and their medium? Can the body ever escape the visual truisms of the camera-eye as Rempel questions? Photomontage, nonetheless is neither an agreement of time or space between the assembler and the photographic fragments they assemble. Photomontage is characterized by its own very fracturing–just as much as the assembler themselves. The destruction of the photographic image more or less reflects the inner destruction of the perception of the image. Gustav Klucis writes of photomontage as resistant of canonization by its very essence, that it excludes the clichés of authentic convention by its very nature. (Klucis) Therefore the interpreter's gaze is abrupted just as much as the body is perceived as distorted figuration.
There is an inherent feeling of insufficiency within us all. There is a limit to human experience in which we all (secretly or otherwise) wish to surpass, beyond the bodily form. This wish can be satisfied in numerous ways, but first, one must self-acknowledge the limits through perpetual probing: erotic experience can lead to discoveries of ones limits, life or death encounters, traumatic events, spiritual interactions with the supernatural, and even a belief in the beyond all contribute to one’s exploration. Though to explore and thus portray these limits through the vehicle of art, one must also be willing to experiment, take chances. Nietzsche famously wrote, “There is almost no phrase wherein profundity and playfulness do not hold hands.” It is this very infantile curiosity that is also penned in Breton’s manifesto of Surrealism, “It is perhaps childhood that comes closest to one's 'real life'; childhood beyond which man has at his disposal.” Truth for Breton and Nietzsche lay situated not in the past (of childhood per se), but at the very core of one’s self. To unlock this inner truth and to seize it, is what we are all after—a return to pure, free source. The freedom to explore.
Jacques-André Boiffard, French photographer and medical student involved with the surrealist movement, was known for his exploitive and close-up images of everyday objects and the human body. Much like Höch’s Red Mouth his radical fragmentation fractures the body or object’s supposed completeness, transforming an element into an object that is fully emancipated from the body or origin itself liberated from its context and confines. His exploration on desire from the perspective of transgression, oscillates between attraction and repulsion— What writer, anthropologist and de facto leader of the dissident Surrealist group, Georges Bataille would later refer to as ‘inter-repulsion’. There is something peculiar yet familiar about Boiffard’s famous close up image of a big toe.
We are aware of its being, and yet it is so far removed from source that we question our authority of perception. Its inter-repulsion brings forth the fracture on which it lies as not only the subject but social prohibitor. Bataille writes on the big toe in Visions of Excess:
“The division of the universe into subterranean hell and perfectly pure heaven is an indelible conception, mud and darkness being the principles of evil as light and celestial space are the principles of good: with their feet in mud but their heads more or less in light, men obstinately imagine a tide that will permanently elevate them, never to return, into pure space.” (Bataille 23)
The form of the big toe he goes on, is not specifically monstrous but rather an idealized encounter by means of displacement through seduction, fetishization. This shameless portrayal is emblematic of what is otherwise know as, The Uncanny. (Das Unheimliche: "the opposite of what is familiar'') It is a combination of the familiar and unfamiliar, termed by Sigmund Freud. The uncanny is a psychological concept describing something that is strangely familiar that causes a cognitive dissonance within the individual. Simultaneous attraction and repulsion via the object–in this case, the photograph. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object: “That can’t be a toe!” but enticement to continue looking— inter-repulsion. Many of Boiffard’s photographs are well understood in terms of the 'uncanny' in Surrealist practice. This negation of context is precisely the basis of which many Surrealist artists work upon. Decontextualising one’s thoughts or desires is an attempt to gain sovereignty over one’s repression. Repression in the context of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is the exclusion of distressing memories, thoughts or feelings from the conscious mind. Shock on the other hand, is an alternative route to the subconscious. Boiffard’s photography is what one may call, shocking.
On the notion of an attraction-repulsion binary there underlies a term mentioned earlier, Convulsive Beauty. André Breton states at the end of his book Nadja, that Convulsive Beauty is just like a train… destined to produce shock. (Breton 159-160) Be it delight or dread, anything but passivity seemed to be the goal for many surrealists artists and writers alike. Another binary lies in which our psyche exists on the fracture of wanting to succeed and wanting to destroy one’s self, otherwise known as the Freudian Death-Drive. This internal and external split precisely creates the tension that lies at the root of our existential anguish, that in which the fragmentation of our aliveness seeks salvation within. “I have cultivated my hysteria” Baudelaire writes in Intimate Journals, “with jouissance and terror.” From this quote we can gather that life seems to be a never ending search for what Lacan would call, Object Petit A—the unattainable object of desire.
Georges Bataille contended that sexuality existed on the binary of prohibition and transgression, Surrealists celebrated the transgressive power of images, thus celebrating the fracture. Bataille speaks on the notion of the “Beyond” in his book Inner Experience. The Beyond is made and unmade by transgression of its very own limits, he writes: a space both interior and sovereign of an impossible abyss in which the transcendent operates. This notion of a beyond can be thought of as parallel to the depths of a Freudian psyche. The subconscious, in particular is where he argues that sexual experiences reveal the absence of a God or transcendent being. God here can be synonymous for Object Petit A— or unattainable desire. The sovereignty in which Bataille describes in Inner Experience arises at the moment of rupture. In this context, sovereignty is gained through destruction and transcends the totality of what it is when it no longer subscribes to something that has to be. But how close do we have to get? How much fracturing do we have to endure? The body will always bend before it breaks.
“This is as close as you can get. I can’t get you any closer.” The soft voice of artist, Kate Craig in her video work, Delicate Issue makes the viewer hyper-aware of the barrier of one’s skin, of one’s self, no matter how close we get.
A pioneering Canadian video, multimedia and performance artist, Delicate Issue was shot by Craig’s husband, Hank Bull with an extreme close-up lens, as a camera passes over her naked body. Spoken text merges with the sound of heavy-breathing, a heart beat and other bodily sounds. Hairs, pores, and folds of skin all become abstract and emancipated from Craig’s body. “Does intimacy breed obscurity?” asks Craig. Behind the lens, you are simultaneously too close yet too far. Intrigued yet repelled, one takes on the position of voyeur yet both subject and object; Craig’s body is never objectified, much rather we consider our own bodily perceptions. Shifting and complex boundaries that demarcate the public from the private, the skin and the self. Kate Craig sacrifices her skin as a barrier, and her body as cage, to question and disrupt the idea of woman as object; exploring the embodiment and feminism through rejection of the male-gaze. Delicate Issue asks of the viewer more or less, does getting closer to our desires, or our thoughts confuse ourselves or bring us closer to the truth?
Perhaps we will never know the reality of being whole. Perhaps life is a never ending search for jouissance, or for “the thing” that is at the root of all our anguish, all of our internal fragmentation. So much of what is free lies along the periphery; the binary that acts doubly as separator and connective tissue—eroticism and disgust, transgression and prohibition. What the Surrealists and those who followed have done is realize both the alienation and captivation in the splitting of one’s ego. This acknowledgement in itself is an act of salvation; of self-sacrifice, that transcends the bounds of reality and our perception thereof. Marvellously mending the gap.