Welcome To The Surreal World
Surrealism Game
The photos above are an example of a surrealism game used by many surrealist artists and photographers. How is game is played is that someone will start by drawing the head/face of the person and then fold it when finished and then passing it over to the first to draw the next body part. This is continued until the whole drawing is done. This helps surreal artists as you do not know what the end product will be. This is shown in all the photos of me experimenting with this surrealism game.
Summer Work
Notes taken
- Finding the extraordinary within the ordinary - relationship between photo and reality
- "Optical unconcious"
- Relationships between unrelated objects within the frame
- Combination of straight and manipulated images
- Focus where there was no focus
- Surrealist manifesto - influence of Freud's unconciousn mind (dreams)
- Sex (Freud again) the key to understanding humans
- Association of normally unrelated objects
- Automatism: Freud's idea of free association to reveal unconcious mind - random shapes forming objects (later Max Ernst, Joan Miro)
- Freud didn't like surrealism - artists should paint the concious mind
- Freud wanted to understand the unconcious mind, surrealists wanted to embrace its weirdness
- ‘As Breton says, surrealism is not just an art movement. It is a way of thinking, a way of transforming existence.
- Surrealism also aimed at social and political revolution and for a time was affiliated to the Communist party.
- Oneirc - dream like(Salvador Dali, early Max Ernst, Rene Magritte)
Surrealist Artist that I believe show surrealism in different ways
Max Ernst and Joan Miró. Automatism was the surrealist term for Freud’s technique of free association, which he also used to reveal the unconscious mind of his patients.
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Oneiric (dream-like) by SalvadorDali
Paul Delvaux
Sleeping Venus 1944
Oil on canvas
support: 1727 x 1991 mm frame: 1770 x 2032 x 55 mm
Presented by Baron Urvater 1957 Foundation P Delvaux - St Idesbald, Belgium/DACS, London 2002
Sleeping Venus 1944
Oil on canvas
support: 1727 x 1991 mm frame: 1770 x 2032 x 55 mm
Presented by Baron Urvater 1957 Foundation P Delvaux - St Idesbald, Belgium/DACS, London 2002
Alfred Stieglitz' Equivalents inspired work
The idea of these images were to capture images by chance. I created these images by walking around with the camera around my neck taking photos as I walked creating the theme of chance.
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French naturalized American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer whose work is linked with Dadaism. However he was careful about his use of the term Dada and his direct association with the Dada groups. Duchamp had a massive impact on the twentieth- century and twenty first-century art. By the start of the First World War he had rejected the work of many of his fellow Artist as ‘Retinal art’ which means only intended to only please the eye. Duchamp wanted to put art back in the service of the mind.
My Figure
Lengths of Strings:
- Height-171cm
- Hand- 17cm
- Wrist - 10cm
- Bust- 43cm
- Leg- 98cm
Experiments
After looking through the series of images that I had took i thought that a good starting idea of experimentation would be to layer the images. For the first experiment I layered the string photo over another string photo and then lowered the fill on the image so you could see.
For the first experiment I layered the string photo over another string photo and then lowered the fill on the image so you could see the other photo underneath. I also put a hard light filter on the top photo to create a stronger colour. I believe this image has been successful as it looks like a Marcel styled image and there is a lot of texture in the image.
For this second experiment I again layered the string photos over each other again. I also again lowered the fill on the top photo so you could see the photo underneath. For this experiment I put a vivid light on the top image. I liked this filter on this image as it made the background a lot darker and brought out the white in the strings.
I thought this experiment was the most interesting one that I had created. This because it was shaky and imperfect making an unusual image. I believe that the blur image on top of the other gives depth to the image.
In this experiment I wanted to experiment with ripping and cutting my string photos. I wanted to experiment like this to see what the outcomes would be like. I believe this experiment has been successful as it has a look of different textures and layers within the image that i have created. I believe there are a lot in image images in this photo that I have created such as a bird and fish like animal.
Hair and dust photograms
I started to experiment with photograms, but photograms in a different way. The way in which this photogram is differement to other photograms is that it as self portrait in the fact that i have created an image with my lose hair from my hair brush and skin cells from my hover to create self portrait without it being an actual image of me. I believe this image has been successful as this is a lot of texture in this image and the dust has made a cloud like texture in the image making it rather surreal and dream like. I also like how there is an image in the image and that you can see all the textures of my hair in the image.
I believe that this has been a successful experiment as you can see the individual hair strands. I like the fact that you can see in detail of the hair in the foreground and blurred hairs in the background in the which creates layers and depth. I also like the smug on the right side of the photogram where it has not been developed fully.
I believe that this has been an interesting experiment as you can see lots of different textures in the image created by layers of hair and dust. although that the photogram hasn't been developed fully I think that watermarks make the image a lot more interesting.
Equivalence
John Baldessari inspired images
This is another series of images using the theme of chance. The theme of chance has been made by pushing the balls which makes them go in different ways therefore catching them in different movements. This is how the theme of chance has come in to this series of images.
Bill Brandt
Bill Brandt was a british photographer and photojournalist. However he was born in Germany, Brandt moved to England where he had become known for his images of British society for such magazine as Lilliput and Picture Post and later was distorted nudes, portraits of famous artists and landscapes. Till this day he is still widely considered to be one of the most important British photographers of the 20 the century.
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'The truth under the beauty'
Originals
Black and white edits
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneeman is an American visual artist. Mostly known for her work on the body, sexuality and gender. Her work is usually characterized by her research into visual traditions taboos and the body of the individual in relation to t he social bodies.
Her art work has been shown in many different galleries and museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art in New York and The London National Film Theatre. Schneemann has taught at several universities, including the California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter College, and Rutgers University, where she was the first female art professor hired. She has also been published widely, producing works such as Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter in 1976 and More than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings in 1997.
Carolee Schneeman is an American visual artist. Mostly known for her work on the body, sexuality and gender. Her work is usually characterized by her research into visual traditions taboos and the body of the individual in relation to t he social bodies.
Her art work has been shown in many different galleries and museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art in New York and The London National Film Theatre. Schneemann has taught at several universities, including the California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter College, and Rutgers University, where she was the first female art professor hired. She has also been published widely, producing works such as Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter in 1976 and More than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings in 1997.
After look at the natural texture image I thought I should turn them black and white as then they wouldn't clash with the skin texture image, I also thought that would highlight each other better in black and white.
Final Outcome
I thought that this was a very successful final piece as it a very unique and interesting image combining both natural textures and the up close skin textures. By including both the nature and skin textures it has a slight link back to Bill Brandt as he takes photos of bodies on beaches which is using both skin and nature texture.
A look inside the body
George Bataille
George Bataille was a French essayist, philosophical theorist and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." His writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as eroticism, mysticism, surrealism, and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including post-structuralism.
George Bataille was a French essayist, philosophical theorist and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." His writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as eroticism, mysticism, surrealism, and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including post-structuralism.
Display ideas
This was my final idea of a display. I have printed the photos off in A3 while also incorporating George Bataille's extracts into the images some how, I believe that this is successful way of incorporating both of my ideas together.
Personal Investigation
I am interested in the topography of the human body; its lumps and bumps. I have explored the anti-beauty of the everyday body. My photographs adopt an intimate viewpoint in which the details of the body are documented and the viewer is confronted by an unfamiliar terrain that is simultaneously alluring and grotesque. I began my investigation with research about the Surrealists because they were also fascinated by the human form, transforming the way it was presented by the camera.
Surrealism is a way of thinking, a way of seeing the unseen. Surrealism was an art movement of the late 1920s early 30s, inspired by the disgust of Dadaists and the experience of the soldiers of the First World War, many of whom returned home disfigured, amputated, and ruined. Surrealists wanted to challenge and explore the inner workings of the subconscious and therefore challenge the traditional notions of beauty, because they wanted to step away from the broken culture. They wanted to offer an opportunity for true liberation from the past and society’s old rules and personal hang-ups. This proposed a revolution in the arts and culture in order to mend what they believed to be broken. In the summer term, in preparation for my investigation, I created a photography game about the idea of chance. I took a series of images depicting day-to-day scenes that represented my subconscious life. I attempted to capture everything you see day-in, day-out, but from an unusual angle. I also produced a series of images by giving my camera to my friend, who then walked around the streets of Brighton taking photographs. I found the images that he took were strange as he focused on very different subjects to those I would have selected.
I looked at a Marcel Duchamp work entitled '3 Standard Stoppages’ and how he had recreated the one metre measurement in different ways. One of the ways in which he developed this idea was by cutting a metre ruler like a wave so it appeared not to look like a ruler but was still a metre long. Another way he developed his idea of recreating the metre ruler was by using string that was measured to the same length. Duchamp then would drop the string from onto paper from a metre above, then stick it down. This was all because in 1913 Duchamp said ‘Painting is dead. I’m going to turn to different things’. Photography was becoming increasingly popular at the time, replacing paintings as the most important form of visual art.However Duchamp was not a photographer and did not use photography, instead recording his experiments in the form of abstract objects. Another reason why Marcel Duchamp wanted to recreate the metre was because it was thought that a metre was a given thing. He decided to put the stoppages to use by putting them on an old painting that he had started and abandoned several years previously. He traced on the templates that he had made from the way the threads fell on to the canvas over the top of his old work, then called this piece the Network of Stoppages.100 years later, Duchamp is still one of the most daring challengers of ideas. I recreated Duchamp’s idea of the string but changed it; measuring string to different lengths of my body parts and then dropping them onto paper from above, photographing how they came out. This linked to Surrealism and chance as I did not know how the strings would land. Another way this piece of work links to Surrealism is that people would look at the photos of the string and not see that it was a self portrait. They would probably only just see strings on a page.
Another artist whose work is based around the theme of chance is John Baldessari; often referred to as a Surrealist for the digital age. In 1970 he decided to set all of the work he had created between 1953 and 1966 on fire. In 1971 he made a famous announcement ‘I will not make any boring art’. He has been in over 200 single shows and over 1000 group shows. In 100 years he believes he will be known as ‘the guy that put dots over people faces’.
His photography-based work in the early 1970s often incorporated chance, games and accidents. In a series of images that he called ‘Carrots’, he placed down three carrots, one of which would be pointed at by someone. This was documented through the photos, and then the carrot would be replaced with another two and photographed again. He repeated this process until he had ran out of vegetables. I started to use his idea of chance by hanging five balls on string from the ceiling. I began to swing one of the end balls, bringing chance into the formula as I did not know how the balls would collide and therefore did not know how the resulting photos would look. I decided to shoot this set of images in black and white as I didn’t want any of the colours in the rest of the room to reflect on the balls. I believe that this choice has made this set of images more interesting than if they were shot in colour, as the black and white gives the images a bit more of natural contrast. All my images were taken on manual setting and manual focus so they would be properly exposed and focused. The shots were taken on a Canon Eos 550D, shot 1/10 f/14.
Baldessari displayed his work in grid form for this series of work - a format that I thought I could use in a similar way. However, he displayed his images in small series, whereas I used nearly the whole series of images to create a big abstract grid of the moving balls. I chose to display my series of images in this way because it made for an interesting abstract image that makes the audience look into the image to really see what it is, as from a distance you cannot see that they are balls moving in a different way in every photo. I feel that this first outcome has shown the theme of chance really well as it shows the different stages of the movement of the balls that happened at random. I feel that the way I have arranged and displayed my work has made it more interesting to look at than if I had picked out the best 10 images and framed them. I think by having selected the first 100 images in the series and then printing them off small has made it more interactive for the audience to view it. This is because the small photos in grid format allow people to get up close to the images to see what they were. I also think that by including images where I am in the frame, I made it more interesting as it was not just balls throughout the series. I therefore feel that this has been an interesting first outcome for this unit and has helped me show an element of surrealism through chance.
So far I have observed the surfaces of the body through a macro lens; seeing all of the little wrinkles and bumps on the skin that are not clear to the naked eye. What interested me about using a macro lens was that I could get up close and personal with the human skin through a camera - enabling me to capture the ugly side of the normal day-in, day-out look of the skin. I want the audience to respond to the images in a way that makes their skin crawl; forcing them to see the haunting truths of the human skin. After taking a series of close-up images of the skin, I tried to make them look a bit more interesting than they already were by editing the images to make them black and white. I found that this made the images beautiful while still making the viewers skin want to crawl. After going through the whole series of images I had the idea to photograph natural surfaces up close and in black and white. I felt that the natural surfaces and skin surfaces really fitted together, inspiring me to combine the skin photos and the nature photos together in a grid. Displaying my work in this way really emphasised the similarities in the textures of the surfaces and skin, while creating a big, interestingly beautiful image.
I think that this outcome has been successful in showing the theme of surrealism in a different way to my previous one. In this final outcome I have used the sub-theme of convulsive beauty. I think the photos I have taken in response to this sub-theme are very unique and interesting. I feel that I have composed these images in an interesting way, and by doing this made some unusual textures look really beautiful. I believe the way in which I have displayed and edited the images of both the up-close skin and natural textures have a very unique look. Again with this piece, even though it is framed, the viewer still has to step forward to admire the image and see what is really in the image, making a strange looking pattern from afar. I feel that this is what makes my work so interesting as it makes the viewer get involved in the piece. Therefore I feel that this has been another successful final outcome.
To continue my work in examining the body up close, I decided to look inside the body by taking photos of the inside of the mouth. I came up with the idea of looking inside the body after coming across some of George Bataille’s work on the body and some of his essays written about the big toe and the mouth. He documented his work with grotesque photos of the inside of the mouth and close-up images of the big toe. I therefore started by taking photos of the inside of the mouth and then editing them to bring out the colours in the mouth. After this I began to read George Bataille’s essay on the mouth and picked out extracts of the essay to display with my photos. I did this because I thought that it would be interesting to do something similar to Bataille’s work with the writing accompanying the image. I started to refine this idea more by just taking out a line or a couple of words from each extract and incorporating the selected words into the images themselves, forcing the audience to look into the image to read the words placed onto the teeth. The intention was - as with my previous final piece - to make their skin crawl while looking at the images and reading the words.
In the final piece of this unit I wanted to create something even more unusual than my last one. Therefore after looking Bataille’s work I took a different approach to convulsive beauty. I feel like the photos I have taken and again the way I created and edited them was unique, because I also incorporated parts of Bataille’s essay on the mouth into my photos of the inside of the mouth. I feel this makes them slightly ironic. I think that the way I have displayed the images has worked well for them as I have printed them on A3 glossy paper so all of the textures and colours come out in the image. I have also framed them so they can hang from a wall so that again with this piece, the viewer will have to lean into the photo, this time to read the writing in the mouth, causing the skin to crawl. Because of this, viewing the photographs will be a slightly unpleasant experience, but this was their intended effect, so I feel that this has been a very successful outcome to end this unit on.
Throughout this whole unit, I believe that my understanding of surrealism in photography has expanded massively and has been demonstrated in my work throughout the course. I believe that all of my final pieces have shown some different elements of the theme of surrealism. My last two final pieces in my eyes have been my most successful, because I believe that they have reflected surrealism in a unique way. This is because it shows the theme of the body in two different but similar ways; different because one shows the outside of the body and the other the inside, but similar because both are ugly. Therefore I feel that I have explored this theme in a very unique way, but yet still having everything relevant to theme of surrealism and has been shown throughout all my work.
Surrealism is a way of thinking, a way of seeing the unseen. Surrealism was an art movement of the late 1920s early 30s, inspired by the disgust of Dadaists and the experience of the soldiers of the First World War, many of whom returned home disfigured, amputated, and ruined. Surrealists wanted to challenge and explore the inner workings of the subconscious and therefore challenge the traditional notions of beauty, because they wanted to step away from the broken culture. They wanted to offer an opportunity for true liberation from the past and society’s old rules and personal hang-ups. This proposed a revolution in the arts and culture in order to mend what they believed to be broken. In the summer term, in preparation for my investigation, I created a photography game about the idea of chance. I took a series of images depicting day-to-day scenes that represented my subconscious life. I attempted to capture everything you see day-in, day-out, but from an unusual angle. I also produced a series of images by giving my camera to my friend, who then walked around the streets of Brighton taking photographs. I found the images that he took were strange as he focused on very different subjects to those I would have selected.
I looked at a Marcel Duchamp work entitled '3 Standard Stoppages’ and how he had recreated the one metre measurement in different ways. One of the ways in which he developed this idea was by cutting a metre ruler like a wave so it appeared not to look like a ruler but was still a metre long. Another way he developed his idea of recreating the metre ruler was by using string that was measured to the same length. Duchamp then would drop the string from onto paper from a metre above, then stick it down. This was all because in 1913 Duchamp said ‘Painting is dead. I’m going to turn to different things’. Photography was becoming increasingly popular at the time, replacing paintings as the most important form of visual art.However Duchamp was not a photographer and did not use photography, instead recording his experiments in the form of abstract objects. Another reason why Marcel Duchamp wanted to recreate the metre was because it was thought that a metre was a given thing. He decided to put the stoppages to use by putting them on an old painting that he had started and abandoned several years previously. He traced on the templates that he had made from the way the threads fell on to the canvas over the top of his old work, then called this piece the Network of Stoppages.100 years later, Duchamp is still one of the most daring challengers of ideas. I recreated Duchamp’s idea of the string but changed it; measuring string to different lengths of my body parts and then dropping them onto paper from above, photographing how they came out. This linked to Surrealism and chance as I did not know how the strings would land. Another way this piece of work links to Surrealism is that people would look at the photos of the string and not see that it was a self portrait. They would probably only just see strings on a page.
Another artist whose work is based around the theme of chance is John Baldessari; often referred to as a Surrealist for the digital age. In 1970 he decided to set all of the work he had created between 1953 and 1966 on fire. In 1971 he made a famous announcement ‘I will not make any boring art’. He has been in over 200 single shows and over 1000 group shows. In 100 years he believes he will be known as ‘the guy that put dots over people faces’.
His photography-based work in the early 1970s often incorporated chance, games and accidents. In a series of images that he called ‘Carrots’, he placed down three carrots, one of which would be pointed at by someone. This was documented through the photos, and then the carrot would be replaced with another two and photographed again. He repeated this process until he had ran out of vegetables. I started to use his idea of chance by hanging five balls on string from the ceiling. I began to swing one of the end balls, bringing chance into the formula as I did not know how the balls would collide and therefore did not know how the resulting photos would look. I decided to shoot this set of images in black and white as I didn’t want any of the colours in the rest of the room to reflect on the balls. I believe that this choice has made this set of images more interesting than if they were shot in colour, as the black and white gives the images a bit more of natural contrast. All my images were taken on manual setting and manual focus so they would be properly exposed and focused. The shots were taken on a Canon Eos 550D, shot 1/10 f/14.
Baldessari displayed his work in grid form for this series of work - a format that I thought I could use in a similar way. However, he displayed his images in small series, whereas I used nearly the whole series of images to create a big abstract grid of the moving balls. I chose to display my series of images in this way because it made for an interesting abstract image that makes the audience look into the image to really see what it is, as from a distance you cannot see that they are balls moving in a different way in every photo. I feel that this first outcome has shown the theme of chance really well as it shows the different stages of the movement of the balls that happened at random. I feel that the way I have arranged and displayed my work has made it more interesting to look at than if I had picked out the best 10 images and framed them. I think by having selected the first 100 images in the series and then printing them off small has made it more interactive for the audience to view it. This is because the small photos in grid format allow people to get up close to the images to see what they were. I also think that by including images where I am in the frame, I made it more interesting as it was not just balls throughout the series. I therefore feel that this has been an interesting first outcome for this unit and has helped me show an element of surrealism through chance.
So far I have observed the surfaces of the body through a macro lens; seeing all of the little wrinkles and bumps on the skin that are not clear to the naked eye. What interested me about using a macro lens was that I could get up close and personal with the human skin through a camera - enabling me to capture the ugly side of the normal day-in, day-out look of the skin. I want the audience to respond to the images in a way that makes their skin crawl; forcing them to see the haunting truths of the human skin. After taking a series of close-up images of the skin, I tried to make them look a bit more interesting than they already were by editing the images to make them black and white. I found that this made the images beautiful while still making the viewers skin want to crawl. After going through the whole series of images I had the idea to photograph natural surfaces up close and in black and white. I felt that the natural surfaces and skin surfaces really fitted together, inspiring me to combine the skin photos and the nature photos together in a grid. Displaying my work in this way really emphasised the similarities in the textures of the surfaces and skin, while creating a big, interestingly beautiful image.
I think that this outcome has been successful in showing the theme of surrealism in a different way to my previous one. In this final outcome I have used the sub-theme of convulsive beauty. I think the photos I have taken in response to this sub-theme are very unique and interesting. I feel that I have composed these images in an interesting way, and by doing this made some unusual textures look really beautiful. I believe the way in which I have displayed and edited the images of both the up-close skin and natural textures have a very unique look. Again with this piece, even though it is framed, the viewer still has to step forward to admire the image and see what is really in the image, making a strange looking pattern from afar. I feel that this is what makes my work so interesting as it makes the viewer get involved in the piece. Therefore I feel that this has been another successful final outcome.
To continue my work in examining the body up close, I decided to look inside the body by taking photos of the inside of the mouth. I came up with the idea of looking inside the body after coming across some of George Bataille’s work on the body and some of his essays written about the big toe and the mouth. He documented his work with grotesque photos of the inside of the mouth and close-up images of the big toe. I therefore started by taking photos of the inside of the mouth and then editing them to bring out the colours in the mouth. After this I began to read George Bataille’s essay on the mouth and picked out extracts of the essay to display with my photos. I did this because I thought that it would be interesting to do something similar to Bataille’s work with the writing accompanying the image. I started to refine this idea more by just taking out a line or a couple of words from each extract and incorporating the selected words into the images themselves, forcing the audience to look into the image to read the words placed onto the teeth. The intention was - as with my previous final piece - to make their skin crawl while looking at the images and reading the words.
In the final piece of this unit I wanted to create something even more unusual than my last one. Therefore after looking Bataille’s work I took a different approach to convulsive beauty. I feel like the photos I have taken and again the way I created and edited them was unique, because I also incorporated parts of Bataille’s essay on the mouth into my photos of the inside of the mouth. I feel this makes them slightly ironic. I think that the way I have displayed the images has worked well for them as I have printed them on A3 glossy paper so all of the textures and colours come out in the image. I have also framed them so they can hang from a wall so that again with this piece, the viewer will have to lean into the photo, this time to read the writing in the mouth, causing the skin to crawl. Because of this, viewing the photographs will be a slightly unpleasant experience, but this was their intended effect, so I feel that this has been a very successful outcome to end this unit on.
Throughout this whole unit, I believe that my understanding of surrealism in photography has expanded massively and has been demonstrated in my work throughout the course. I believe that all of my final pieces have shown some different elements of the theme of surrealism. My last two final pieces in my eyes have been my most successful, because I believe that they have reflected surrealism in a unique way. This is because it shows the theme of the body in two different but similar ways; different because one shows the outside of the body and the other the inside, but similar because both are ugly. Therefore I feel that I have explored this theme in a very unique way, but yet still having everything relevant to theme of surrealism and has been shown throughout all my work.