It's funny how seeing a simple Crowded House music video can start an entire thought process that traces its aesthetic heritage back 110 years. As I watched its dreamy black and white nonlinear narrative, with its doves, sleepwalkers, split images and celestial framing, it made me realize how much modern culture still ripples with Freudian imagery and Surrealist aesthetics.
Surrealism owes a substantial artistic debt to Freud, the man who first presented to us the concept of the unconscious, a submerged psychological iceberg full of taboo memories, thoughts and desires that ominously guides the greater part of our behavior. Some decades later, artists working in the surrealist tradition (Magritte, Ernst, De Chirico, Picabia, Dali) harnessed these groundbreaking ideas in realizing that art can be enhanced by the unconscious - both in creating and perceiving it.
Their greatest technique was in the way that they created works of art that depicted very real objects and images but that became other-worldly through their framing or juxtaposition or immersed in some strange impossible scenery. As the mind cannot make rational sense of it, the unconscious part becomes activated, forcing us into an entire new and very pleasurable state of consciousness.
Surrealism is dreaming with your eyes wide open.
