DADAISM AND SURREALISM

Analysis of Dadaism and Surrealism

[Name of the Institute]

Analysis of Dadaism and Surrealism

Introduction

The existence of Art in this world is since centuries, and it has gone through different stages. It means that art has its own historical periods, and each period has its own invention and importance. This essay elaborates the similarities and differences between two art periods: Surrealism and Dadaism.

Analysis

From the beginning, of 1920, the art of Dadaism and Surrealism began to rise. It gave a path to the conscious and subconscious minds to think and create something different for the people of their society. In the time of Dadaism, the movement of noise concert started. They expressed their work in an unconventional way and gave the concept of questioning the traditional theories of the western world. Surrealism was an avant-garde art movement that originated in Paris in the 1920s. The key year was 1924, which saw the first issue of the review La Revolution Surrealist, as well as the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and most famously of all, Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. The movement had international ambitions and soon spread across Europe to the Americas (Latin America, the Caribbean, as well as the United States and Canada) and to parts of Asia (particularly Japan) (Richter, 2001).

Surrealist art often included an irrational juxtaposition of elements: elements that, although perfectly ordinary on their own, jointly produced unsettling affects (Harrison, 2009). One of the most vivid examples of surrealism is “Meret Oppenheim's Object” (a cup, saucer, and spoon that have been covered in fur). As the two elements (crockery and fur) meet, the utility of the object has been destroyed, while the sexual aspects of both have been brought to the surface.

For surrealists, dreams were seen as offering a greater reality than the routine world of bourgeois propriety and business profiteering and state sponsored nation building. If dreams were not always available, then dream like conditions could be fostered through games, drunkenness, and other forms of intoxication, “automatic” writing and drawing, random instructions (Fiona, 2001).

Harrison (2009) highlighted that Dadaism is an artistic and literary movement that emerged in Zurich, among emigrant artists and writers in the middle of the 1st World War, during the year of (1916). In their work, they sought to reflect the incoherence, the absurdity of the world, to inform the art of the element of chance and games, according to the method of ...