Freud's (1919) essay on “The Uncanny,” influenced surrealism. Freud suggests that a feeling with the quality of uncanniness is the core aesthetic feeling. Like psychoanalysis, surrealism investigates complex states of feeling, and for it none is more complex than the feeling of uncanniness, that is, the feeling that dream and reality interpenetrate. It is as though dreams are an independent reality, parallel to everyday reality, and everyday reality is a kind of dream, parallel to the dreams one has while asleep. The surrealists understood this core uncanniness in Freudian terms and they made unfamiliar works of art—works that never let the viewer feel at home, in order to evoke the feeling of uncanniness, which they regarded as existentially fundamental.
The surrealists wanted to overthrow the viewer's confident adult judgment. This unsettling shift of psychic position away from conscious experience, with which we feel at home, toward unconscious fantasy, with which we do not feel at home, while seeming to integrate both, is the uncanny ambition of surrealism.
Is there really an American surrealism? Or did many of the American surrealist artists use surrealism as a kind of window dressing for their social concerns, thus betraying the spirit of surrealism, which is heavily indebted to Freud and his methods of investigation of the unconscious?
I suggest that American surrealism is a compromised, inauthentic surrealism. Homegrown American surrealists—as distinct from such European surrealists as Max Ernst, Andre Masson, and Yves Tanguy who came to America to escape the Nazis, or such would-be European surrealists as Joseph Cornell, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko—were conventional, visually conservative representational artists who used a bit of surrealist spicing to make their works seem more aesthetically shocking and emotionally demanding than they are.
The homegrown American surrealists, by which I mean artists who identified with America and were concerned with its condition and future artists, such as Peter Blume and O. Louis Guglielmi, were not simply trying to find a compromise between traditional and avant-garde ideas of art, or between the dominant American movement—social realism—and a trendy European movement. Nor were they only trying to domesticate European surrealism to suit conservative American tastes. They wanted to stop the surrealist investigation into the unconscious, indeed, to suppress and deny the reality of the unconscious. They were subliminally anti-surrealist, not just because of their social interests, but because they were afraid of the unconscious. They gave it lip service. Yea-saying it was a way of giving themselves trendy surrealist credentials, rather than a matter of conviction. In their best work we see a struggle between dream and reality, with reality winning.
Like psychoanalysis, surrealism investigates complex states of feeling, and for it none is more complex than the feeling of uncanniness, that is, the feeling that dream and reality interpenetrate.
The preconceived goal of the American surrealists was political change rather than a spontaneous experience of unexpected emotions. If the public's emotions were aroused by the art, it meant that the art had gotten its social message across.
The American social surrealists were morally preoccupied, and they used surrealist methods as a kind of applied aesthetics, thus superficially irrationalizing what they obviously believed was a socially rational message. They turned surrealism into an acceptable if different style, a mutation of conventional representation rather than an attempt to represent the unrepresentable, in order to present a socially revolutionary message.
In American surrealism the unconscious is no longer the threatening monster the European surrealists showed it to be—hybrid creature, half-beast, half-human, suddenly emerging from the forest, as in Ernst's The Horde, 1927, threatening society with indiscriminate violence and lust, and finally destroying it, but rather a new kind of performer in an old kind of melodrama. The European unconscious is seriously monstrous. It never truly adapts to society, while the American unconscious fits right into American society, as a kind of entertaining clown, like Blume's jack-in-the-box Mussolini in his painting, The Eternal City, 1934-37.
It is because of these shortcomings in terms of richness of fantasy that the work of the American surrealists is less evocative than that of the European surrealists, and why it misses the main point of surrealism: to generate a sense of the uncanny. The American surrealists did not believe that reality itself was in question. Andre Breton, the poet and critic who is the so-called
Donald Kuspit, Ph.D., is professor of art history and philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook. He has doctorates in philosophy and art history, two honorary doctorates in fine arts, and an honorary doctorate in humane letters.
Pope of Surrealism, wrote in his 1928 essay, “Surrealism and Painting,” that surrealism—the idea of superreality or surreality—was an attempt to answer the question of reality raised by scientific investigation into matter and psychoanalytic investigation into the dynamic unconscious. Both called everyday perception and understanding of reality into serious question.
There are few, if any, esoteric symbols in American surrealism, not much childhood vision, and hardly any sense of the omnipotence of the dream. Instead, there are numerous popular symbols and a good deal of recognizable material and familiar subject matter. All of it is conveniently intelligible, a means of communicating with the dispossessed masses.
Compared to the European surrealists, the American surrealists seem sexually and aggressively inhibited, which is why their works lack the instinctive appeal of European surrealist works. Their art generates neither love nor hate, but tepid understanding.
If the uncanny means the feeling of not being at home, then the American surrealists felt at home in America despite their misgivings about it. They wanted to show that their art was useful and moral, which is why they never really broke the social contract. Communism was simply a new social contract for them.
Having experienced World War I first hand, the Europeans had no faith in the social contract. It was always breaking down. The instinctive violence repressed by civilization would invariably return, suggesting that civilization had no lasting effect on human beings, and as such was a farce. Art's task was to articulate the absurdity of civilization and human beings, and to convey the uncanny moment of the return of repressed instinct.
[Editor's note: This article is a greatly abbreviated version of the talk that Donald Kuspit presented at the National Academy of Design Museum in conjunction with the exhibition on American surrealism. We would like to thank Laurie Wilson of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute for helping to obtain and edit this article.]