A brief Insight and my understanding to Surrealism

By- Sankha Subhra Debnath

The work I chose for my assignment is Meret Oppenheim. Object. 1936.

The surrealist movement is what fascinated me the most. I selected
this artwork because it challenges the notion of what reality can be and
how even a slight change in our prenotion perspective about everyday
life can drastically shatter and change the way we see the world. The
object where Meret replaces the cupping vessel with fur is something
taken as sinister and dark by our daily brains, but yet you have to
acknowledge how creative and otherworldly imagination is at work in
this scenario.

Surrealism is something that expands my creative imagination and it

also gives a scope to challenge everything as what it is and why we have
prenotion our perspective by dividing into good and evil. The whole
thing for me blurs the lining between sinister and good and also allows
us an individual to question the nature of how we take in good and evil
as a being.

Her work also can be compared to how Salvador Dali expressed

surrealism in his notion. The surrealist movement changed a vast
perspective in the field of art, movie making, and storytelling as a
whole. In the same context, we can compare her work to the ideas of
Marcel Duchamp who questioned every form of contemporary art and
what should be called bad or good art. There is no limit to the
perception of how we take in good or bad art. It is all indoctrinated by
the culture, socio-political, community we are forced to live in. Thus the
surrealism artworks has enabled modern artists and minds to explore
unchartered territories of the mind as well as the creative limitation set
by the cultural and social boundaries.

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A curated set of Images of Surrealist objects

Theme- The Undesirable yet desirable

I chose the following images from MOMA and some blogs that
corresponds to the theme I want to convey from my understanding of
the concept of surrealism. The very nature of the objects created here
seems to have something uncomfortable and sinister being manifested
from it. The idea of giving unanimated objects a sense of being alive
make our mind go spiraling. The idea here is if we can change everyday
objects into something they are not it can create unexpected triggers
and fears that works at a subconscious level. The very existence of
such objects seems like a threat to our rationality that has been
indoctrinated by our cultural, social norms. According to Surrealist
leader André Breton this new form of sculpture, called assemblage, had
the power to puncture the thin veneer of reality, and tap into the
subconscious mind and trigger our fears and sinister imaginations. He
also mentioned that effect of such objects are much profound when
made into mass produced objects and objects used in our daily lives.