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 Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art
Book by Celia Rabinovitch; Westview Press, 2002
Preface
This book attempts to create a new perspective, both deep and wide, of the surrealist movement and the manifestations of the sacred in modern art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By employing the phenomenology of the sacred and the parallel histories of art and religion, we will chart the territory between art and religion beyond the historical context of surrealism. Surrealism offers the terra intermedia, the special zone that opens to this new field. This larger area of art and religion previously has been explored by others but primarily from the single focus of history or theology, Jungian or spiritualist studies, or from the perspective of specific religious traditions such as Catholicism or Buddhism.
Earlier, compartmentalized studies have relied on the limited approach of a single discipline. Here, I conceive of the experience of the sacred in modem culture through the spatial concept of the threshold between the sacred and the mundane. Although the ambiguity of this threshold creates some conceptual confusion in the mind of the observer, it also marks a boundary zone of experience where the origins of art and religion are one. This special state of mind cannot be definitively explained by traditional concepts of religion or by the varied approaches of the history of art, from formalism to deconstruction.
Within the history of knowledge, the creative insight that works through wit, compression, and metaphor epistemologically can be defined as a type of rejected or illegitimate knowledge. The artist's creativity eludes the parameters of the logical thought process but has its own logic-the logic of symbols. In art or poetry, the insight and image that use the poetic language of metaphor or analogy, wit, or paradox express an original form of knowledge that transcends conventional art historical approaches. In the history of knowledge, the faculty of imagination that impels the symbolic transformation of experience into art or religion has been seen as either regressive and fanciful or illuminated and inspired. Experiential knowledge remains a questionable area of study even if empirical methods are imposed, as they were by Freud in the development of the psychoanalysis of dreams, or by anthropologists in studying aboriginal cultures. Because of this tension in the European conception of knowledge, powers of insight, intuition, or imagination have been relegated to the realm of illegitimate knowledge. Disciplines that observe human experience, such as psychology (and psychoanalysis in particular), anthropology, and the history of religions each have struggled for acceptance in the first part of the twentieth century. In fact, only after World War II did the artist's studio enter the university, because prior to that time art was practiced in special academies that descended from an original medieval guild-of those who used the mortar and pestle-indeed, the guild of the artist, the alchemist, and the apothecary were connected because each physically transformed matter into essence or meaning. |
TIn this book, I describe the space between modern art and the sacred by considering the source of modern consciousness in the creative imagination and relating these to an epistemological consideration of symbolic transformation in art and religion. Overlooked by the history of knowledge, the unique state of mind embodied in surrealist art can be described by the language of insight, for which the Chinese or Japanese artist developed a vocabulary many years before one developed in Europe. This is a legitimate language found in the tradition of the scholar-artist of T'ang to Sung dynasty China, whose evanescent landscapes intentionally evoke meditative reflection. More recently, Western approaches such as self-psychology, phenomenology, semiotics, or deconstruction have proposed new concepts that attempt to interpret the nature of human experience and communication. To complicate matters, from Apollinaire in the first decades of the twentieth century until the mid-1970s, the high argument of modem art history proposed that art followed a progressive development toward pure abstraction. In this book, I employ a new perspective that sees individual works of art as the embodiment of perception, rather than through the historical pattern and direction developed by the ideology of modernism.
Surrealism has much in common with alternative religious traditions including occultism, theosophy, and fascination with Buddhism in the West from the mid-nineteenth century forward. It pursues a new state of mind that finds magic and the uncanny in common events, attempting to re-enchant modern experience beyond the rationalism of Descartes and others. The surrealists' evocation of the uncanny, however, was not the abstract spirituality of the symbolists; instead it resulted from the surrealist artists' search for sacred mystery in the moment itself, combined with their responses to war and social catastrophes that altered the twentieth century. In their art, surrealist artists incorporated responses to industrialization, mechanization, and records and memories of the blasted faces and bodies of war. In the history of ideas, it engaged utopian politics, occultism and alternative religions, as well as archaic images from the pre-Christian past. This makes surrealism complex, and it has been prone to many interpretations, many of which are correct simultaneously.
Specifically, surrealists intended to transform modern consciousness to evoke a special state of mind: the surreal. Popularly used to suggest anything strange or weird, the surreal has roots that extend from archaic thought through medieval supernaturalism to Romanticism. The surreal allows for the fluid or ambiguous embodiment of the perception of sacred power in an ordinary event, object, or mood. In this unusual stance, the ordinary takes on marvelous qualities and is transformed into the extraordinary. The surreal is not, therefore, a noun or adjective with a specific definition but rather a practice or experience of the world leading to an altered state. oday the sky is the limit to exercise your imagination, intelligence, and ambitions...
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