Nadine Beck

collages established this medium as a viable form of art production and its integrative idea of language that considered spoken, visualised or written down pictures as equal forms of a common, primary mental material, has inspired many works of art. Surrealism’s interest in automatism and the connection it drew between the thinking and acting had a formative influence on the work of the young Abstract Expressionists, which then themselves had a major influence on the art that followed them. 3

Therefore, Surrealism can rarely be defined like any of the “isms” that modern art is usually split up into. Its influence is ubiquitous, but exactly in the guideline Breton pushed through, he stressed that Surrealism is not a style but an attitude of mind, and that makes it difficult to concretely establish proof of this influence. Owing to this, you can, in a certain sense, call any art that gives subjectivity priority or uses the functional methods of the mind and brain as a subject as standing under the “surrealistic” influence. Furthermore, the word has found entry into the colloquial everyday language, so that nearly every work of the fine arts, literature or film that has a hallucinatory touch or is set up from unconnected fragments is classified as “surrealistic”.

Surrealism was an international movement that was spread and spread the word through the publications of its ideas as well as due to the fact that its members moved from Paris (back) into the whole wide world. Its sphere of influence was vast and its ramifications numerous. The success and popularity is above all traceable to what extend the world of fashion and especially that of advertising made use of its pictorial language. Although the initial case for this kind of publicity was created by the Surrealists themselves: in 1939, Salvador Dali designed decorations for a shop window of the Bonwit Teller warehouse in the famous Fifth Avenue in New York, drew an advertisement for perfume and created a textile pattern for Elsa Schiaparelli including a shoe hat. ⁴ But as Dali worked for the advertising world, Rene Magritte’s work was plundered and misused by advertising men for their purposes: instead of men in bowler hats, like in Magritte’s Golconda, it is raining cigarettes, as it was he case in the CDP advertising campaign for Benson and Hedges in 1983. ⁵ Maybe Andre

³ ibid. p. 73

⁴ ibid. p. 74

⁵ ibid. p.75

2

Nadine Beck

Breton would have even liked this way of subversively influencing the everyday life with surrealism. It was a movement that stood open for the variety of modern life, its members were absolutely fascinated by of the possibilities of communication and adventures that the modern city was offering. ⁶ Therefore, every city has a surrealistic potential. In Aragon’s 1926 surrealist text Paris Peasant, the city with its urban life in bars and cafes is presented as a whole host of impressions, surrealistic objects and actions: “ It is here where surrealism can fully unfold itself… Pictures drizzling down like confetti! Pictures, pictures, pictures everywhere. On the ceiling. In the filling straw of the armchairs. In the straws of the drinks… In the flickering air…snow down, pictures, it’s Christmas!” ⁷ This special atmosphere, that was closely related to Paris, was already history in 1942 when artists like Max Ernst, Breton and Andre Masson or Man Ray were emigrating to the United States. New York had become the centre of the new surrealist activities, influenced themselves by other emigrates like Marc Chagall or Piet Mondrian. But the Paris atmosphere with the social life and exchanging ideas in its cafes was not transferable, and thus, the face of Surrealism necessarily had to change ⁸ . After the Second World War, the surrealist “think tank”, as it existed in Paris, was dead, because its members were spread all over the world, but together with the ideas of their predecessors of Dada, they infected many important art movements of the past 50 years.

But before the Surrealists came into being, they were influenced by Dada and thus they could be considered as Dada’s blood-related heir. Dada officially died in 1924 with the birth of Surrealism. However, while its existence was rather brief, its posterity is loomed large. Again, there was no Dada “style”, like the surrealists, that could give way to a Dada “school”. Dada rather is a “spirit of irony, doubt, provocation, anarchy, revolt, and negation en masse of all values of modern society” ⁹ that has inspired others. And again, Dada is international and is refusing to be justified as an “ism”. After 1945, the dada spirit can be traced in many different art groups in Europe and the United States. The new realists in France, for example, featuring the funny, crazy and completely useless machines of one Jean Tinguely are

⁶ ibid. p.74

⁷ Free translation of: Aragon, Louis, Der Pariser Bauer (Frankfurt, 1996) pp.91

⁸ Klingsöhr-Leroy, Cathrin, Surrealismus (Taschen Verlag, Cologne, 2004) p.25

⁹ De L‘Ecotais, Emmanuelle, The Dada spirit (Assouline, New York, 2002) p. 20

3

Nadine Beck

in a very straight dadaist tradition, they are poking fun out of the senseless machinery world and virile military behaviour with reference to the absurdity of the last two World Wars. French artist Arman, also known as Armand Pierre Fernandez, who was working with Yves Klein, has been producing accumulations since 1959. They mostly were industrially produced objects of the same kind, collected in boxes of acrylicglass in such masses that their use was eliminated and thus discovered the critical dimension of consumption. In 1961, the so-called coupes and colères followed, made of objects like music instruments, which were cut into pieces and then composed anew or manifest into acrylic-glass. Like Niki de Saint-Phalle, Arman let some of his objects, the combustions, explode voluntarily to then exhibit the remains. Later, his inclusions showed objects covered in polyester or even in concrete ¹⁰ . Cesar Baldaccini, another artist of the surrounding of the new realists, on the other hand did not only produce compressions of diverse materials on wood, but also as a counter part, invented the expansions, extreme enlargements of body parts like thumbs, breasts or hands. These collages, assemblages, destructions or compressions are all in the tradition of Dada, although the latter expansions are showing a “surrealist” touch [sic!], too.

When Ben Vautier, the concept-, Fluxus- and action- artist, paints “This is not art!” ¹¹ , it is Dada at its purest. And it is no wonder that the collective term for the tendencies of the 1950s and 60s that were not connected with the abstract styles of the Informel and Tachism in Europe and the Abstract Expressionists in the United States and that were going back to methods developed in the Dada times, were called Neo-Dada. This is again a term made up by art critics, characterizing those works of art that are connecting art with life by using commodities or utensils. This gave way to pop art and artists like Andy Warhol, whose Campbell soup cans and bottles of Coca-Cola are more contemporary forms of Dada. ”Today, Dada corresponds to what we call `counter culture´: rap is Dada, tags are Dada. In sum: Dada is dead, long live Dada! ¹² ”. So pop-art artists like Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg are actually Neo-Dada, too. In contrast to Dada with its polemic, very politically motivated destructive attacks on art and society is Neo-Dada searching for new ways of

¹⁰ http://www.prestel-kuenstlerlexikon.de/search.php?type=detail&id=71&searchkey=Arman

¹¹ De L‘Ecotais, 2002, p.21

¹² De L‘Ecotais, 2002, p.21

4