Gold Corrosion: The Art Game and Surrealism

Geoffrey Hamilton
April 15, 1997

Before King David wrote his Psalms, the Psalms had been previously unexpressed and unknown. Once Sir Walter Scott wrote Ivanhoe it could be seen as previously inexpressible and unknowable. So when Andre Breton made this statement: "I expressed what was considered inexpressible . . . I have divulged what was said to be still unknowable", he was only using hyperbole to hide the banal. Many things are inexpressible and unknowable. As an example, 90% of the matter of the known universe is said to be too dark to know or express much about. Ignorance is such a vast field of endeavor that the contents of newspapers divulge each day what was previously considered unknowable and inexpressible. Nevertheless, Breton was correct to say what he said, as he, and other surrealists, managed to do exactly what was necessary to compete with the grandiose expectations of newspaper readers. Therefore, Breton and his adherents Tristan Tzara and Salvador Dali were able to formulate a new game, called surrealism to justify random thinking and created new values in art and so expressed the once inexpressible so their audience could know the once unknowable.

That art is a game is difficult for many people to accept, but if the standard definition of games is observed and it is not forgotten how seriously other games are played, then even people who think art is holy can begin to see the game of art. For clarity, all games can be said to involve limited goals/values, that are constrained by rules, and which are played for an emotional reward. The emotional reward is contingent on an estimation of success in a game that is gauged to be more difficult to achieve than a certainty, but easier than an impossibility. I will compare the game of pinball with art to demonstrate the art game.

The goal of pinball is to win another game, or obtain the highest score, both limited and relative goals. The goal of art is to 'get it' or obtain a personal enlightenment, both personal and relative values. The rules of pinball constain the player from tilting the machine, and the player herself will not violate the rules by smashing the top of her own machine in order to grab the ball when desired, as the game would not be valuable any longer. Art involves rules (like motifs, symbols, composition, aesthetics, materials, words, etc....) which constrain the art work's communiqueŒ to an acceptable language; the players will not use "hate" to mean "bid" as art will no longer be valuable. Emotional payment is received by a player from the achievement of the limited goal through the accepted rules. Art and the pinball game, will offer negative emotional stimulation, like frustration, until the game is finished or abandoned. Without the game structure neither art nor pinball can mean anything. Both activities will not be played if they are perceived as either too easy or too hard. Also a person's determination of ease or difficulty changes during and after games; a pinball game or an artwork which is deemed too difficult one year could become too easy another year. This variation of an artwork's effect on individuals shows that art, like any game, has no permanent or directly inherent value to any observer. A parallel context to consider regarding both activities is that they must be estimated as valuable enough to play, yet mysterious enough to challenge the individual during the acquisition of that value -- as the expending of effort is how the value of an object can increase. As both art and other games have no effect through a mere close proximity to people, it shows that both things must be experienced under similar conditions. The fact that art is meaningless if it is not played with, or cannot be played with, shows that art only becomes more than dark matter when the grey matter wants to play with it. Any claim that art is actually more than a game of meaning creation is absurd as the disagreement, relativity and inconsistency of the totality of art criticism testifies only to the folly of absolutes and that a separate political game of one-upmanship is actually going on.

The surrealists, as their nom de guerre suggests, thought a great much of themselves. Realism was the dominate popular art game of the theatre and despite the period's highbrow fashion for radical artists, realism was the popular fine-art form as well. For surrealists to claim to be better than the canon was bold and boastful though it was necessary for several reasons. The most important reason was that it saved the dadaists, as the founders of surrealism once called themselves, from their own nihilism.

Dada could be described as 'anti-realist' as it was against, what it members considered later to be the 'cultural' baggage of the past. However, at the time of dada's height, Tristan Tzara spoke often for the movement regarding something more disturbing than cultural baggage, the pointlessness of existence. He recognized that culture was not to blame, but that all nature was a mistake: "The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way." -- "For everything is relative / Words...have a different meaning for every individual." -- "You will never understand that life is a pun" (Ruben). He and the others rejected the art of the past not only because past culture was a mistake, but because all life was a pun -- a joke -- a game. Dadaists played games to satirize past culture in order to expose it's punyness. They even attacked themselves for their own movement's futility. Their problem was nihilism's dead end; there is nothing to play with or even against after the reason for nihilism has been demonstrated. They needed a way out of their own trap. They found it in their use of random art.

The most significant technique of dada satire was automatic writing and other forms of random art. These techniques began as a joke to show that art could be made out of anything, but soon dadaists fell in with their enemies and began to glorify their interpretations. They realized how much fun they were having, and how personally meaningfully the games had become. Without intending to they had begun a new culture which was too personal to condemn. The dadaists, at their own, individual pace, began to believe that automatic art could produce real art -- better than real art. Freud's growing authority in psychology gave them their warrant.

Freud's theory of a connection between 'free association' and a supposed deep truth revealed in dreams was the route of justification for random art. With Freud's growing cashŒ their old randomness could be rationalized towards grander roots than a roll of the dice had. Further, the individual could become the master of his domain as the 'grandeur' of this new art was entirely within the prerogative of the individual's ego. Dada had allowed an artist total freedom, but its prodigy, surrealism, perhaps for the first time in the history of art, allowed the personality of the artist leave to be itself for the benefit of 'mankind'. Breton in 1924 showed his hand when he proclaimed the certainty of the movement's new rational: "I believe in the future resolution of the states of dream and reality, in appearance so contradictory, in a sort of absolute reality."(Motherwell, 64). The claim was further elaborated when Tzara changed his dada tune and claimed that "the mouth thinks", in that free association's randomness bypasses the relative meaning of language to create a primitive communist and so more absolute and genuine form of communication. While not every surrealist subscribed to the communist leanings of the surrealist movement, the general thrust that something grand was occurring was indeed the foundation of the movement. The earlier dada self-consciousness that random art was a game had been forgotten as their game had done its job and transcended itself towards new meanings. The surrealist movement's rational, that allowed meaning into any accidental slip of the brush, gave players enough game created value and energy to last them for many decades and even beyond the cynical later scribbles of Dali and Picasso.

The specific game of surrealism was that a work of art be undirected so that the artist and the viewing public are put on an equal footing. The first part of the game is the creation. In this stage the artist must pretend that he or she is tapping into the truer recesses of his of her own psyche. The second part of the game is allowed to begin with the final stroke of the artist then both the artist and the public compete to come up with the strongest interpretation. Freud was a guide for the game for most people, but as psychology changed, Jung and others formed other kinds of rules of interpretation. However, behind all these contemporary rule makers was a more powerful force, what Herbert Read calls that "obscure instinct" (Read, 21) which determines meaning for people. This is Read's description of the seemingly undirected political trends which account for the strengths and weaknesses of ideas. As no one person could speak for such a force, or for surrealism -- given the randomness -- the game remained unending and the material for many interesting cocktail parties over the decades.

The art games, against which surrealism was pitted, consisted of easily recognizable subjects which could in the 1920s be understood in mere seconds: naked nymphs, portraits, historical renderings and pastoral scenes. Some of the earlier games had once been challenging for viewers, through the use of classical allusion, or facial expression or colour, as the mode of the game. However, these modes were too familiar and so became boring in time. Cubism and newer art forms only delayed recognition of the older rules. The idea that accident could produce a truer meaning was exciting and enticing people to the new challenge: could they discover the submerged and, therefore, superior meaning? As idiosyncrasy was the distinguishing mark of this new meaning, each work of art had to be considered a separate game -- within the game of the artist -- within the game of surrealism in general. I will attempt to distinguish the three levels when required.

Among the mediums which the surrealists had to work with, poetry may be considered the most problematic and least universal. Besides the problem of choosing a language and the need of finding a literate audience to match, words are used in a logic system that has the specific task of making subjects rational. To ignore the expectation that sentences are to be rational (even ungrammatical sentences are searched for their rationality) is to violate the rules of the game of language. To circumvent this problem the randomness was limited to paragraph creation out of rational sentences, or it was limited to other larger structures where the expectation of rationality could be satisfied in part.

Tristan Tzara used this rational 'randomness' in poems like "Evening" where the linear rationality of language is only modified by the use of non sequiturs. Unlike his own dada game of picking sentences or words out of a hat and arranging them chronologically to see what they could mean, in the new game the hay prickles, cows moo and lovers are melancholy, yet occasionally the lovers dip chicadees in ink and clean the face of the moon. In this game the randomness is indistinguishable from another art form's sense of sloppiness. An audience that sees the non sequiturs as poor writing and nothing more will not want to play with "Evening". Those who see the randomness as fair play will look for the possibilities. For example, inky chickadees could clean the face of the moon if it is allowed that inkiness constitutes the normal state of the moon's face. The surrealist player could be very pleased by such a conclusion, and it would be a novel area of thought. Almost certainly, it was unknown and unexpressed before.

The game Breton offers with "Sunflower" extends the non sequitur game into a psuedo-dreamscape in his ego. Freudian analysis is welcomed into a poem like this. The "shadowless girl knelt down" could be taken as a reference to Breton's sister, as sisters are not to be considered entirely human by brothers -- a shadow of a girl. A girl's sexuality is legally taken away for a brother. The kneeling of the sister could be a request for legal dispensation and, so, the end of that part of the game could be a conclusion that Breton wishes to sleep with his sister. Whether he has a sister or not, or whether the conclusion is true or not is irrelevant, as the surrealist game is designed to allow for such an interpretation.

Robert Desnos' poem "Lying Down" does not necessarily extend the game of surrealist poetry, but instead allows the player a more direct crossover point between surrealist poetry and painting. Verging on clicheŒ, Desnos describes in his poem the typical surrealist imagery: "Parallel to the plumbline of the horizon.... How simple and strange everything is.... In the delirium of uselessness" (Course Text). Desnos' poem has explained the heart of much of surrealist art, especially Dali. Fortunately, there was more to the surrealist paintings than Desnos could elicit.

One of the most important game playing devices in any form of art is the use of puns. In surrealism, Dali may have been the most adept at visual punning, and so that may account for his pre-eminent popularity amongst them. His "Drawing" of 1936 is the clearest example, but his "The Invisible Man" is a richer one. The viewer, or player, has numerous ambivalent images to play with. The most striking is the uterus like object with the positive/negative play between the "ovaries" and the "fingers". The basic language Dali uses is more akin to Jungian archetypes in that his symbols and motifs, like his crutches, skies, eyelashes and clocks, are as near to being a universal language as seems possible. Given this, his punning should achieve a wide basic understanding. However, if even the artist remains ignorant of the total meaning which his paintings imply, as was the case with Dali, the audience is able to take it upon itself to decided on the meaning of the puns. All together, therefore, Dali's game could have wide appeal as it was possible to play, it was open ended (as no one had the power to conclude it), and it was beyond certain what the goal of the game was -- three elements vital to Dali and surrealism's longevity, and helpful to any game.

Another striking surrealist game was the "Object", or fur lined cup, saucer and spoon, by Meret Oppenheim. This was her most famous work and it is possible to see why. The game a general audience wishes to play is difficult to gauge, however, it would be safe to assume that some games are more popular than others, and that not all the potentially popular games are self evident. If most people know what fur feels like, and what sipping tea from a cup feels like, but never imagined the two sensations together, it could be stated that the novelness and adequate ease of the game of "Object" could make it very popular. I would guess that the first thing people do when they see "Object" is imagine themselves sipping tea or coffee, and also how the additional fur sensation would feel on their lips -- and that is the whole game.

Oppenheim was surprised that "Object" was what she was remembered for, but given how many people could want to play that game, as opposed to her other works, then it is not so bizarre. Her later untitled painting with the stylized penis nailed to a cross is another easy game to play. However, the politics of such a game would imply an attack and punishment on much of her audience -- whereas, the apolitical nature of "Object" only offers harmless fun to any player.

Dorothea Tanning joined the surrealist game with a technical and aesthetic skill that exceeded most of her contemporaries, but as the surrealist game is ego driven, she may have made a mistake fatal to her popularity. In her creation of motifs she latched onto objects that, unlike clocks or crutches, had little currency or universality. Tanning's use of her Pekinese dogs as a recurring motif through dozens of her works had the effect of upstaging the individual games for the larger game of an artist which only Tanning herself could understand. No one but she could know the meaning of that dog in those paintings. So, as games will be played somewhere between certainty and impossibility, the effect is that the viewer will understand that this dog is a personal motif and that the meaning will be forever unattainable and so a viewer will not play that game.

Tanning's individual paintings/games were so overwhelmed by the image of her dogs the viewer could lose sight of the specific games completely. Even the paintings without a dog image, like "Sleeping Nude", look as though a Pekinese is hidden somewhere. Another painting, "The Guest Room", which has many interesting puns, and could have become a surrealist masterpiece on its own, was originally shown with at least four other paintings that had a Pekinese dog prominent. Even the more universal of her motifs like the rose and the sunflower, if placed in every painting could not have dominated the comprehension of her whole game as her Pekinese does. However, once the dog enigma is put aside, which the text in the 1995 Tanning retrospective tries to do, the other games, which the text prefers to play with, finally come to the fore. Perhaps only then can the previously unknown and unexpressed be experienced in her games.

Games of all kinds have a great ability to create meaning and perhaps only games can do so. If surrealism offered anything new it was a reason to accept the previously unacceptable, that some games, at least dada games, are rich with meaning creating properties. Andre Breton and those who followed the tenants of the surrealist game may have only been able to communicate the banal and in no more original manner than their births gave them leave, but sometimes even the most minute change in the direction of the wind can supply the freshest of breezes.

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