Why is Surrealism regarded as the art of the unconscious? Focus your answer on one artist. (James Gleeson)

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Caitlin Furze

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Why is Surrealism regarded as the art of the unconscious? Focus your answer on one artist.

        Exploring the realms of dreams, nightmares and the unconscious mind is the role of Surrealism. A literary and artistic movement founded in Paris in 1924. Using various techniques, the artist allows the images from their unconscious mind to evolve without conscious control. Surrealism is still a significant and important art movement in the 21st century, and it’s longest serving proponent is Australia’s James Gleeson. For more than eight decades James Gleeson has devoted his life to Surrealism and its ideologies. From his confronting War imagery of the 40’s, the heroic and classical nudes of the 50’s, his 60’s and 70’s ‘psychoscapes’ and his grand yet disturbing visceral visions of the 80’s and beyond; James Gleeson’s paintings reflect his Surrealist imaginings, the visions of his unconscious mind.  

        Surrealism is a literary and artistic movement that explores the realms of dreams and the unconscious mind through poetry, visual art and motion pictures. Founded by a group of Parisian intellectuals led by writer Andre Breton in Paris in 1924, Surrealism is a revolutionary movement, an offshoot of Dada but with a positive artistic expression. Influenced by the psychological theories of Freud and Jung, Surrealism taps into the unconscious mind as a source for its creativity. Surrealist artists         were fascinated by these theories recognizing that the unconscious mind has important messages for the conscious mind. The role of the Surrealist artist is to help us see the messages that emanate from the collective unconscious. As Carl Jung says:

        Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating         the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking.         The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in         the unconscious. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from         deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values,         thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his         contemporaries according to their powers. 1  

Surrealist artists concentrated initially on Freud’s ideas of expressing the unconscious mind through the technique of automatism, drawing executed without conscious control. Later new techniques employed by Surrealists included, frottage: making a design by placing a piece of paper on top of an object and then rubbing over it, as with a pencil or charcoal, collage: composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and colour and decalcomania: which involved the rubbing of paint arbitrarily between two sheets of paper. Surrealists depict a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Themes that frequently occur in Surrealist paintings include metamorphosis, chaos, objects in unnatural contexts, mythology, heroes and fragmentation; objects that appear include anatomical fragments: arms, legs, eyes, fantastic machines, sky, oceans, viscera, and shells, usually distorted, twisted and unnatural. Although a movement born as a reaction to the rationalism that dominated early 1900’s society; Surrealism remains a significant art movement in the 21st century as an expression of the unconscious, evident in the works of Australia’s and perhaps the world’s most visionary, venerable and gifted exponent of Surrealism, James Gleeson.

                                        

        James Gleeson, born in Sydney in 1915 and turning ninety this year is now into his eighth decade as a Surrealist painter.  And according to art critic Bruce James, Gleeson is:

        …Australia’s supreme servant of the dream, our court artist of Surrealism.         Patrician in his tastes and painstaking in his techniques, Gleeson is no less         than a Dali with dignity.2

Gleeson began painting in the 1930’s and was influenced by the writings of Breton, Freud, Jung, Blake, Auden, Gascoyne and T.S Elliot, and painters like Dali, Bosch, Grünewald, Turner; and Ernst whom he views as  the first visual Surrealist. Gleeson sees Surrealism as a way to express moral, social and political commentary about a dangerous and uncertain world; Surrealism gave him the tools to deal with the reality of life through the utilization of human experience, dreams and imagination, the subconscious. Gleeson said in an interview in 1995 that, “I stuck with Surrealism because I was a Surrealist. I was born like it and couldn’t work in any other way.”3 He believes that the whole consists of two parts the rational/irrational, conscious and subconscious, and to approach reality you need both. As a painter, Gleeson prefers the term ‘subconscious’ rather than the Freudian/psychoanalytical ‘unconscious’. The ‘subconscious’ mind implies the site of ideas and impulses that can be recalled into consciousness; according to Gleeson, these are not readily accessed from the ‘unconscious’ mind. He has studied over the decades the various Surrealist techniques of image making and these have provided him with the essential tools and impetus for his art. Gleeson’s distinctive use of frottage, decalcomania and collage all relying on the elements of chance, disjunction and surprise have enabled him to express his subconscious thoughts, as he said in 1940/1:

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        The dream and fantasy are positive attempts to solve the problems that the         conscious mind has been unable or unwilling to solve…Surrealism is a         vigorous attempt to solve the problems which are facing us today by drawing         attention to the fact that the roots of these evils lie in our minds…4

James Gleeson’s painting style over the last eight decades has evolved through a number of transformations and metamorphoses but ideologically he has remained a Surrealist.

        The paintings of Gleeson from 1938-48 were a reflection of his youthful Surrealist ideals, influenced by Picasso’s transgression of form and Dali’s ...

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