Dippy, Trippy Dali

When you think of Surrealism, or see a Dali painting, what words come to mind for you?  Me, I think "trippy," "illogical," "morbidly interesting, " but mostly "dreamlike".  I do not like Surrealism, at least in a visual arts setting; the entire dream-scape that they portray is disconcerting and very unsettling for me, but I know that it appeals to many people. 

I went on a cruse a couple of years ago and that was the first time that I was introduced to Salvador Dali.  The art director set up several lectures and one of them was over the surrealist master, Dali.  We saw a video that Dali and Walt Disney worked together on a very long time ago, but had been locked in the Disney vault ever since the two mega-minds of art put it together.  Destino is a crazy, jolting trip through baseball and visual poetry and star-crossed lovers, all managing to be conveyed with nothing but music and fantastical images.

  Destino, by Dali and Disney

I researched Dali for a class once and read that one method Dali had when painting was to eat a very large meal then go sit outside in the sunshine, with the intentions of falling asleep.  He would put a metal bowl on his lap and hold a spoon in his hand and hold it slightly upright.  As he drifted off, his muscles relaxed and his arm would drop, causing the spoon to clang against the bowl.  Because he did this, Dali was able to paint what he saw in his dreams and create the twisting and illogical scenes that we find in his paintings.  I think that this technique is possibly the coolest idea ever for exploring the dream world, I just don’t like Dali’s dream world!

But Dali is by no means the only Surrealist out there.  We move on to Frida Kahlo, a Mexican woman who suffered, among other things, an obsession with artist Diego Rivera.  She often created self-portraits with exaggerated honesty about her looks and a variety of odd headdresses or other truly unexpected accessories, like nails, only serve to reinforce my dislike for this style of art.

Even though I do not like the surrealist movement, I can accept that it has played a part in moving the art world into the modern art styles we find now….even though, to me, it will never be as good as A Rock On A Stick!

Shades of Freud

To me, Freud has always been an interesting, if somewhat eccentric and ahead-of-his-time individual.  He challenged all kinds of the established views of life, dreams, sex, and human development; often he put forth ideas that his contemporaries had never even considered before.      

Although discussing sex and sexuality in class is something that will probably never be a comfortable topic for anyone, I really have to admit that Freud introduced some very interesting ideas for people to discuss and ponder.  His claim that all psychic disorders can be blamed on repressed sexual urges is fascinating, to say the least.  I also find it interesting that a scientist of his caliber would discuss certain aspects of sexuality, such as sadism and machos; these topics are, as the book writes, often considered taboo subjects that most people would never consider discussing in polite society.

Freud chose to discuss topics that for most people cause a lot of embarrassment if it ever comes out that they are influenced by these issues or tendencies.  The fact that Freud choose to openly discuss them and to do research into them helped immensely to bring them from the pits of “pretend they do not exist” to “just hide them behind the door.”  

But more than his research in to the stems of psychic disorders, he made great strides into the somewhat esoteric field of dream meanings, something that even more than seventy years after his death, we still cannot understand, and thus relegate dream interpretation to psychic hotlines and charlatans.  He chose to assign the meaning of dreams to the expression of the three parts of the mind: 1) the id, as the place where human instincts reside 2) the ego, the portion that provides the id with the ability to act on those instincts and 3) the conscience, the portion of the psyche that determines the morality of the desires of the id and the method of expression chosen by the ego.

Freud, with his revolutionary theories and radical ideas, made himself a permanent fixture in the search to understand the human psyche, what makes humans tick.  I’d like to leave you with a few words from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents:

                       

The hermit turns his back on the world and will have no truck with it.  But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features have been eliminated and are replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own.