Surrealism.

Surrealism is the love triangle between experience, perception, and ‘self’. We perceive and we experience, the two come hand in hand. ‘Self’ barges in, and adds another dimension. What could have otherwise been a simple relationship, is now something much more complex, and resonates with the sounds of something outside the realm of objective reality. ‘Self’ brings to experiencing and perceiving, a history, values, clouded memories of past experiences, regret, hope and joy. The ‘self’, its ability to perceive and experience, is often obscured by nostalgia, anxieties, inhibited desires. Surrealism is in this context, also the void that lies between the nature of our inner voice, and our faculties to reason, and be impartial. It epitomises the nature in which we perceive the moment in its many and different shapes, sizes, and angles. What we see, will certainly not be the same as what any other sees. What we see, will only be an abstract version, one of many, of reality. 

I was listening to some jazz music one evening, not so long ago. The music presented me with a goulash of sounds, perfectly chaotic and theatrical. Voices came and went. They entered, were enriched by the accompanying instrumentalists, and left. The music was calm in parts, festive in others. The musicians improvised and moved with one another freely. The pianist called out to the saxophonist, who would respond with fervour. One song would burst open with a trumpet solo, whilst another seduced the listener with the arousing voice of the female lead vocalist, who would open gently before she took to an undulating string of nonsense words and utterances - they call this scatting. You could call it w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r. The music reached my within, and fed it with expression. Artists have a habit of doing that, providing our sub-conscious with a voice. They paint, write, sing out what we might have at that moment, or at some other, have felt and experienced. 

Such are good paintings, well written books, rehearsed solo musical performances, all entities that are far from homogenous. Like love, friendships, relationships, each interpretation, each experience, is one that could never be reproduced, at least not identically. Yet the artist captures our thoughts, our imagination, and finds empathy in our emotions in a myriad of ways. They might find a connection with a passage of our lives, or even just a fleeting moment. Perhaps they will draw to the surface of our consciousness an anxiety, or an insecurity that we discreetly nurture within us. In doing so, they echo some of our abstract, surreal versions of reality. 

Perhaps then, it is offered in art, a method of capturing objectively, the excitement of one present moment that may shout out the idealised, romantic happiness of Armstrong’s ‘What a wonderful world’, while the next may come silently, and with a sense of desperate isolation with Friedrich’s painting ‘The wanderer above the Sea of Fog’. 

The world we live in is one where the individual is almost constantly buffeted by wave after wave of diverging emotions and moods. It is a world where we are often dragged, involuntarily, by tides of life altering moments, into the sea of experience. We are drowned, and then resuscitated by intoxicating moments of joy. While we think the going is steady, we can very easily be led adrift once again, to find ourselves swimming in the misery of regret, stranded out in the middle of the ocean, alone with only bitter-sweet memories. It is in this world where nothing is for certain, that we recognise the importance of artists who have the ability to pluck a moment, be it a feeling, a thought, a dream, regret or desire, from out of the surrealist realm that is life, in its constant state of flux, and present it to us, in a multitude of forms that we can empathetically appreciate. Perhaps it is in this context, where our experiences, in hindsight, are all of a surreal nature, that we can understand Martel, the French Canadian writer’s, call to arms… ‘If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams’…