comparing and contrasting dada and surrealism

Where the Twain Meets: Dada and Surrealism Distinct artistic movements, genres, and philosophies, Dada and Surrealism do cross over and share considerable points of reference. Dada made its mark on the art world first, with its genesis in Switzerland during the First World War (“Dada and Surrealism,” 1). In fact, Dada was never constrained by visual media, with poets and performance artists at the forefront of the largely political and reactive movement (“Dada and Surrealism,” 1).

To call Dada avant-garde, or progressive, would be an understatement, because Dada transformed the ways people thought about and created art. Art was no longer about creating aesthetic beauty or pleasing a patron, but about actively challenging social norms, politics, and even what it means to be human. Dada art can be provocative, but is not necessarily so, with some artists using their medium to question and even “humiliate” art itself (Rubin 11).

The politics of Dada have been dubbed “anarchic,” but are just as much ironic given the “anti-art” and anti-establishment sentiments brewing within its artistic circles in Europe (Papanikolas 1). Dada laid the groundwork for several other artistic movements that followed, including surrealism. Surrealism has a definitive starting point: the publication of Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. With Breton’s manifesto, surrealism became quickly known as being more “programmatic” and formal a movement versus its looser precursor in Dada (Rubin 12).

Breton begins his definition by explaining the core elements of surrealism: its emphasis on dream states and the subconscious or unconscious mind, and an acknowledgement of profound discontent with materialism and the way things are in mundane, established reality: “Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way,” (Breton 1).

Far less political in tone and focus than Dada, surrealism drew far more heavily from the prevailing research in psychology and psychoanalysis (“Dada and Surrealism,” 1). Yet like Dada, Surrealism was also about the absurd and especially locating the absurd paradoxes in human existence. Dada simply focused a little more on absurdities in social and political life, including within the art community; and surrealism focused more on the peculiarities of the human imagination and altered states of consciousness.

Both Dada and surrealism have survived, planting seeds that have flourished in several other genres and eras. Both Dada and surrealism have the capacity to be conceptual, using the media to convey a message that is beyond the sum of its visual parts. Yet surrealist artists do aim for an aesthetic harmony that is evident in works by Magritte and Dali. It is almost as if Dada seeks to destroy, and surrealism seeks to put the pieces back together again—albeit in an unconventional, illogical, psychedelic or phantasmagorical way.

Understandably then, there seems to be more anger embedded in Dada work than there is in surrealist art. Dada and surrealism were both products of their times, embedded firmly in their social, political, and historical contexts. World War One and its extreme violence initially gave rise to the Dada movement, which was also influenced by Marxist theory and nihilist philosophy (“Dada and Surrealism,” 1).

Surrealism emerged as the artistic counterpart and synthesis of the flourishing of psychoanalysis, spiritualism, and secular humanism during and after World War II (Ades and Gale 1). The turning inward of psychoanalysis and the Jungian dream landscape characterized surrealism, making it an inadvertent predecessor to the psychedelic counterculture movement of the 1960s. Dada tended to be more extraverted, concerned with political, social, and economic institutions and their implications for human potential. However, neither Dada nor surrealism would make any overt, literal statements about war or the human mind.

It is not as if Dada was protest art, even if it might have sprung from the visceral wellspring of horrors that reverberated during and after the total war era. Similarly, surrealist art was not pandering to psychoanalysts or to be used as counterparts to psychoanalytic techniques. Artists like Duchamp, Dali, Miro, and Magritte manipulated materials in ways that empowered the viewer to take a more active role in perceiving art, and to allow art to be a catalyst for individual and collective change.

Their audiences might have seemed limited at the time, but their goal would have been to reach deep into the recesses of the global mind to change the ways all people view and interact with art. The use of non-Western or pre-industrial elements as symbols in art during the early twentieth century signified not so much a romanticizing of these types of civilizations, especially viewed from the biased European eye. Rather, the goal was to show that the presumed superiority of European civilization is based on false premises.

When Duchamp first exhibited his iconoclastic readymade works, it initially shocked the art community and then reverberated in a total change in the way art functioned in society. Surrealists and Dadaists both employed humor deftly to achieve their goals, evident particularly in Duchamp’s “Fountain” and Dali’s corpus of oddities. Dada and surrealism both broke the boundaries of what constitutes “art,” and not just in terms of employing multimedia techniques and methods into their visual constructions and compositions.

Certainly, the range of installations, collages, and assemblages is alone remarkable but both Dada and surrealism went a step further to include non-visual art forms like literature, performance, music or sound, and poetry. There are no boundaries or provisions for either Dada or surrealism, even though the latter did have a manifesto. The artist is free to deliver the message or tell the story or evoke an emotion in whatever way works best.

Being unrestricted in execution meant that the variety and scope of work created during the Dada and surrealist movements are profound. There are no single defining features of either genre, only core philosophies. Their respective philosophies are similar in their ultimate goals, and different in their means, methods, and focal points. Both Dada and surrealist artists would employ ordinary objects, known as “readymade” pieces, into their work but Dada was practically defined by its use of such items.

The most prolific and renowned readymade item artist was Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp’s portfolio spans genres far beyond the readymade and even beyond Dada, but with works like “Bottlerack,” “Fountain,” and “Bicycle Wheel,” Duchamp definitively established himself as the de facto mage of readymade. Of these three readymade works, “Bicycle Wheel” was the first to roll out on the global art stage in 1913.

The titular object is positioned atop an ordinary stool, in which Duchamp constructed a functional hole in which the wheel could perch and even be spun if the viewer so wished to interact with the work. “Bottlerack” was completed in 1914, and “Fountain” in 1917. “Bottlerack” takes the concept of “Bicycle Wheel” a step further, because Duchamp does not modify the readymade item at all but simply places it in front of the viewer in Dada iconoclasm and anti-art sentiment.

Likewise, “Fountain” is a mere urinal, embellished only with a crass bit of bathroom graffiti: a man’s name “R. Mutt.” All three of these epitomize the principle of the readymade in the Dada vocabulary: they are “man-designed [sic], commercially produced, utilitarian objects endowed with the status of anti-art by Duchamp’s selection and tilting of them,” (Rubin 17).

Perhaps on some level Duchamp invites the viewer to contemplate the difference between the curves, materials, forms, and meaning of the readymade versus what typically passes for sculpture in art salons. More likely given the Dada zeitgeist, Duchamp presents the readymade with a more poignant discursive intent: to force the viewer to question aesthetic norms and traditions, to question the role and purpose of art, and even to request the viewer to see all lived objects in a new light.

No Duchamp work, and perhaps no other work at all, can capture the iconoclasm of the Dada movement more than “L.H.O.O.Q.” In this strangely named work, Duchamp does what had not been done effectively before: boldly defacing one of the world’s most famous, visible, popular, and iconic paintings. Duchamp takes an image of DaVinci’s Mona Lisa, and draws a moustache on it with a pencil.

The act is certainly provocative, brash, and seemingly childish but it is “more than just a Dada attack on high art,” (Rubin 19). Rubin claims that Duchamp was “drawing attention to a sexual ambiguity in Leonardo’s life and work,” (19). Like surrealism, Dada did sometimes have a purpose beyond the airing of grievances relative to prevailing political or social affairs.

Altering classical works of art like the Mona Lisa became somewhat of a trend in Dada and also in surrealism, one of the few visual, conceptual, and methodological points of commonality between the two movements. Sometimes the technique of altering famous work ends up blurring the distinction between Dada and surrealism altogether. For example, Man Ray’s work often straddles the boundary between the Dada and the surreal.

His 1924 “Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres's Violin)” achieves something remarkably similar to what Duchamp does with “L.H.O.O.Q.” Here, Man Ray takes Ingres’s painting and adulterates it judiciously, drawing not a moustache but the cut outs on the body of a cello or violin. The result accentuates the curves in the female form, drawing the viewer’s attention to the similarities between the female body and the instrument while evoking erotic and sensual sentiments too.

Like Duchamp, Man Ray interjects questions about human sexuality through an unusual medium that draws on the pastiche of the past in quintessential postmodern manner. Man Ray did in fact work with Duchamp on many occasions and the artists did end up fusing some of the methods of Dada and its iconoclasm with the psychoanalytic tendencies of surrealism. Man Ray and Joan Miro started exhibiting work at the start of the surrealist era.

Miro’s work tends toward abstraction but in “Dutch Interior I,” the artist does what Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp did before him and adapts an older work of art in order to ask questions through visual engagement with it. However, in “Dutch Interior I,” Miro does not actually take a copy of the original and adulterate it with a moustache or brush strokes, but instead deconstructs and reconstructs it in a deliberate and surrealistic way.

Drawing therefore from the cubist methods of deconstructing and reconstructing elements, Miro fuses several art traditions in this painting, as if to show the viewer what the original Sorgh painting meant to him and how it affected his mind. What makes “Dutch Interior I” more surreal than Dada is its peek into the mind of Miro, as well as its hallucinogenic forms. Surrealism was in fact more psychedelic and dreamlike, and less intellectual or nihilistic, than Dada.

Although not collages, works like “L.H.O.O.Q,” “Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres's Violin),” “Dutch Interior I,” and other alterations or mashups are similar to what Dada and surrealist artists do with collage and assemblage. Collage and assemblage were children of these two movements: multimedia methods and means. Prior to Dada, art was neatly segregated into its constituent categories of sculpture, painting, literature, and the like.

The Dada and surrealist movements gave birth to a new way of seeing potential in objects that were not used before as media in art. It was now possible to take manufactured goods and turn them into art, to paste together different types of media, or to incorporate words and other elements into art. Contemporary art in the twenty-first century owes tribute to these eras, because it is now considered gauche to create works that are only in the service of a prefabricated beauty.

Art is supposed to either provoke critical inquiry or expose the subconscious mind: which are the two main goals of Dada and surrealism, respectively. The nonsense that characterizes Dada, and which in fact defines it and distinguishes it fully from other movements, became expressed as a more cohesive vision in the surrealist imagination. By the time Dali painted “Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire” in 1940, several decades had passed since the Dada movement first began in Switzerland.

Dali does derive many of the motifs in “Slave Market” from the vast canon of art and literature, most obviously the bust of Voltaire. Thus, like Duchamp, Man Ray, and Miro, Dali uses the postmodern techniques of piecing together pre-existing images or concepts and then reassembling them in the way the human mind can blend together disparate feelings, memories, and thoughts in the dream state. Dali’s painting is also similar to his surrealist counterpart Miro, in its aesthetic vision and overall composition.

Whereas the Dada artists deliberately eschew prettiness in favor of provocation, Dali and Miro do cover their canvas with color and return to a traditional aesthetic. Their return to aesthetics does not mean reverting to any preconceived construct of what art should be, though. Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte also offered compositions that did conform to more traditional aesthetics than Dada art did, while still retaining the core elements of the absurd.

In “La Condition Humaine/The Human Condition,” Magritte presents a trope used commonly in literature: a frame narrative or a play-within-a-play, only here in visual form. Magritte offers viewers a painting of a painting, which is not a painting at all but a window into an unrealistic world in which hats fly on their own accord. Entitling the painting “The Human Condition” is significant.

Magritte shows that perception is often mistaken for reality, and that the human condition is dependent on ways of seeing or ways of knowing. In a very similar way, Duchamp had shown that ways of seeing everyday objects like a urinal or a bottle rack alter perceptions, which lead to unique ways of viewing the world or solving problems. The surrealists and the Dada artists urge viewers to expand their minds and think creatively about every aspect of life, especially those elements that are otherwise taken for granted.

Like the Dada artists, surrealists “perceived a deep crisis in Western culture,” stemming from a sort of ignorance or a lack of seeing the truth clearly (Ades and Gale 1). The occasional borrowing from primitivism, as with Marcel Janco’s 1919 “Mask” is not accidental or unconscious but rather deliberately demonstrates that the modern world is less progressive than many of its proponents might have wanted to believe.

Faced with the realities of war in the technological age, the Dadaists realized that thousands of years of human progress had led to relatively little in the way of radical shifts in paradigm or thought processes. However, the Dada and surreal artists offered distinct types of artistic solutions or approaches to resolving human perceptual limitations. Both the Dada artist and the surrealist would take familiar and readymade objects to recreate or refashion a broader message.

The difference between Dada and surrealism is that whereas Dada aims to make some broader social or political commentary or to challenge prevailing paradigms, the surrealists like Magritte and Dali want to touch more upon the mystical and psychological elements of human existence. In other words, surrealism is more inwardly focused and Dada more outwardly so. Dada is also more nihilistic than surrealism, which promotes an actual goal of “self-knowledge,” (Rubin 15).

A perfect example is Magritte’s “La Condition Humaine,” in which the artist questions the very.