How do surrealism and politics of care intersect and how is this reflected in my art practice?
Whenever I try to understand something, I tend to go back to the roots of the subject so that I can see the bigger picture. Let’s travel back in time and imagine the society’s state after the 1st World War (1914-1918)- the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the German Empire and the collapse of the Hapsburg Monarchy, accompanied by unemployment, famine and epidemics - chaos, despair and loss of hope on a grand scale. Out of this suffering, however, reactionary movements emerged which offered an escape through revolutionary social change.
A prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity movements at the time of the Weimar Republic, George Grosz pronounced that
“Any art is pointless if it did not put itself at the disposal of political struggle… my art was to be a gun and a sword.”
Surrealism was an artistic movement which flourished in Europe between World War I and II. It represented a reaction against “rationalism”, which the movements founding members felt had steered European culture and politics directly into the horrors of World War I. Furthermore, in an often-dehumanising epoch, surrealism expressed many humanising values and ideas, such as love, shared vulnerability, emotional proximity and concern for each other.
Surrealism was an experiment and a challenge to change consciousness. It achieved this through questioning existing criteria, while expanding dimensions of perception and forms of expression. It sought to bring into existence a new reality through a rebellion and rejection of the existing social order. This concern with the relationship between art, politics and care is not exclusive to Surrealism, either. Ai Weiwei, similarly concerned with the social and political dimensions of art, expressed the following sentiment:
“If my art has nothing to do with people’s pain and sorrow, what is ‘art’ for?”
Likewise, Mariana Abramovic asserts that the function of the artist in a disturbed culture is to expand awareness, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind. Surrealism aimed to revolutionise human experience through a transformational exploration of uncharted and neglected aspects of the human condition. As Hans Richter states in “Dada – art and anti-art” surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision. Meanwhile, Russian painter and theorist Kandinsky strongly believed in the revolutionary potential of art saying:
“when religion, science and morality are shaken, the two last by the strong hand of Nietzsche, and when the outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in on to himself. ”
I can’t help but think about the societal challenges that my country Moldova went through over this historical and cultural period. Torn away from its mother country Romania by the Russian Empire in 1812, then fighting for union which barely materialised in 1918, and back to being a part of the USSR in 1940, up until 1991. A nation scarred by Stalinist deportations that forcefully took the aristocracy and intellectuals to labour camps in Siberia and replaced them with ethnic Russians. Suffering a great famine between 1946-1947 and then another war with Transnistria in 1992, shortly after gaining independence in 1991, Moldova was plunged again into economic and political crisis, making Moldova the poorest country in Europe.
I was born in 1995 and I can remember the struggles that my parents went through to raise me and my siblings. Our whole history is filled with blood and struggle to survive, and just by writing this I can feel the rage of my ancestors in my bones. This echoing pain is written in our DNA and the collective psyche, but so is the strength we gained along the way. They tried to erase our identity, they took away our freedom, and although art was overwhelmingly Russian influenced, I am proud to say that Moldova preserved its own culture and traditions.
Bellow you can see some photos found a few years ago in an abandoned house by one of my friends in Moldova. The photographer was Zaharia Cusnir and he was very passionated to document the life and people in his village, therefore leaving a big treasure after his death, without enjoying the glory.The photos are taken between 1955-1973.
Going back to the soviet period, Lenin rejected the possibility of any kind of “liberation” and was, thus, a danger to art, especially literature. He insisted that, “Today literature, even that published legally can be nine-tenths party literature. It must become party literature.” The repression that began with Lenin grew even worse under Stalin, with writers and artists being persecuted and killed. Given this, a government that seeks to control its people – as the Soviet regime certainly did – would, obviously, consider controlling the production of art to be crucial. My grandparents were telling us stories about Romanian literature being confiscated from schools and people punished drastically for even having a Romanian Bible in the house.
A notable surrealist artist from Moldova is Valeriu Buev who confronts the stark costs of humanity’s darker tendencies, such as war and corruption, through the processes of distortion and imagination.
Some surrealists claimed that their principles were compatible with the ideas of Marx and Engels. In 1927, five surrealist artists, including Breton, applied for membership to the French Communist Party (PCF). Their goal was social revolution informed by a Marxist political theory. Although on the surface contradictory, surrealism and communism might be seen to be borne out of the same misery of the human condition, both seeking to elevate mankind through social revolution.
In the end, this alliance between Surrealists and Communists was unsuccessful. While Surrealism sought experimentation, freedom and expansion of consciousness, Communism took a different turn.
The Politics of Surrealism by Helena Lewis (NY: Paragon House, 1988) tried “to link together two revolutions: that of the mind, by liberating the unconscious, and the social and economic revolution of the masses. The Surrealists always maintained that one of the most important ways to undermine capitalism was to destroy the supremacy of bourgeois rationalism and this is precisely what they aimed for in the art.”
Another example of an artist who fought against the social conventions was Frida Khalo. Mexico went through 9 years of conflict and the revolution ended up to be a dramatic shift in the politics and culture. She represented the pride of her nation in many paintings but more impressive was her ability to transform into beauty her vulnerability and trauma, which I find myself doing in my practice with collages. Expressing something real about our human experience through art is a revolutionary and political act - notably in Frida’s time, when women had almost no social or political power.
In my daily meditation, one of the ideas I focus on is that I am in service, and connected to the world through my art. I believe that our talents become meaningless if they aren’t shared with people or used to express something about our shared humanity. Where empathy has broken down within wider societal institutions and social conditions become objectifying or dehumanising, I believe art can be a vehicle for human connection and social transformation.
Bellow are a few examples of how I transformed my difficult emotions into collages.
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