SURREALIST VISUAL FACTS

The Surrealists formed between the wars in Paris. They found suspect our cultural over reliance on words. Some previous thoughts on the literary dichotomy here.  The Surrealist and subsequent Dada movements were founded to counteract our reliance on words and the logic that they produce. The barbarity of the slaughter of WW1 made the Surrealists think that there has to be a better way.

It was the self referentiality of words that bothered the Surrealists the most. Breton insisted that words contained a materiality that signified nothing because of their self referentiality. “Words make love to one another,” wrote Breton. The poem was, to the surrealists, the best format for words. They were amazed to discover that a written passage could produce in the mind a purely visual phenomenon, which then shed its verbal aspects. This visual phenomenon is exactly what we have been dubbing visual facts in these pages.

The Surrealists were striving of course for greater holism. That seems to be a hard wired predisposition of humanity. In Breton’s Second Manifesto, he wrote, “Everything leads one to believe that there exists a certain vantage poin of the mind from which…the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable…cease to be perceived as opposites.”

The Surrealists were searching for an absolute onenesss. Their writings refer to a unity of man which has been dispossessed.

So if words indeed cause wars, what if instead we could develop a language of visual elements, in which each was a beautiful, transparent three dimensional construct? And these would be the foundation of our communication instead of words?

It’s easy if you try.