Surreal art by contemporary artists
Alternative Artifacts is artist Jeff Bartels’ latest series of hyperreal oil paintings which feature strange antiques that never existed. The bizarre objects stretch and bend the truth about our past in order to bring a focus on the deceptions going on in our world today.
The old and worn out objects have a surreal quality that are meticulously painted which causes the viewer to question the authenticity of what they are seeing. The antiques appear to be absurd but they are presented with such precise detail that their stories can almost be believed.
This blurring of lines between what is real and what is not reflects our present day where governments gaslight their own people, propaganda outlets pose as news organizations and social media networks spread conspiracy theories. These are the objects that never happened from a past that only exists in the Post Truth era.
Add “Sorry To Bother You” to the mix and there appears to be an Afro-Surrealism resurgence in Black cinema.
Surrealism is the 20-century avant-garde artistic and literary movement that sought to stir the creative potential of the unconscious mind position seemingly irrational imagery adjacent to one another. Artist Salvador Dali is among the most respect of that era.
Surrealism in film draws upon many of the philosophical principles as in the art world, using shocking, irrational and absurd imagery to challenge conventional reality. American filmmaker David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive are each considered among the best contemporary examples of this technique, while Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling were said to have each incorporated some surrealist ideals in their works.
First coined
in 2009by New Jersey’s Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka, Afro Surrealism focuses on the present day experience of African Americans as interpreted via artistic endeavor.
Read the full article at theshadowleague.com
Afro-Surrealism or Afrosurrealism is a literary and cultural aesthetic that is a response to mainstream surrealism in order to reflect the lived experience of people of color. First coined by Amiri Baraka in 1974,[1] this movement focuses on the present day experience of African Americans. Afro-Surrealism is based on the manifesto written by D. Scot Miller, in which he says, “Afro-Surrealism sees that all ‘others’ who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist…” The manifesto delineates Afro-Surrealism from Surrealism and Afro-Futurism. The manifesto also declares the necessity of Afro-Surrealism, especially in San Francisco, California. The manifesto lists ten tenants that Afro-Surrealism follows including how “Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past,” and how “Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.”
Via Wikipedia.
Need some help getting to grips with Surrealism? The Doctor will see you now. Peter Capaldi, a former art student, and the latest actor to play Doctor Who settles down on Freud’s couch to deliver his wry take on the Surrealist movement.
“Surrealism” has become shorthand for the bizarre, the irrational, the hallucinatory. But what IS it? Today we delve into the history of Surrealism, as it formed in post-World War I Europe and as it has infiltrated our wider culture up to today. Here’s our case for what Surrealism is, and why you should care about it.
This documentary examines the work of the leading exponents of Dada and Surrealism, from the First World War through the 1920s and 1930s. International in scope and diverse in artistic output, both Dada and Surrealism were artistic, literary and intellectual movements of the early 20th century that was instrumental in defining Modernism. The Dada movement, launched in 1916 in Zurich by poets and artists such as Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp, was a direct reaction to the slaughter, propaganda, and inanity of World War I. After the war, many of the artists who had participated in the Dada movement began to practice in a Surrealist mode. Surrealism was officially inaugurated in 1924 when the writer André Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism. Similar to Dada, Surrealism was characterized by a profound disillusionment with and condemnation of the Western emphasis on logic and reason. 1 hour 30 Minutes
Tim Marlow gives a quick introduction to Salvador Dalí, the Spanish surrealist who became the first art superstar of the television age.
[PDF] Foucault, Michel – This Is Not a Pipe
In the early 20th century, Rene Francois Magritte was part of the Surrealist movement in Paris that created unexpected, often dreamlike imagery. A new exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art of works by the Belgian painter is the first major showing of Magritte in two decades. Serena Altschul reports.
Sarah Whitfield, a London-based independent art historian, writer, and curator, is the co-author of the Magritte catalog raisonné and editor of René Magritte: Newly Discovered Works. She was the curator of the 1992 Magritte retrospective and author of its catalog. The second in an annual series named in honor of the late Menil trustee Marion Barthelme Fort, each year this Lecture Series invites a distinguished speaker to discuss an artist in the museum’s collection. Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 (2014).
(An Andalusian Dog) is a 1929 French silent surrealist short film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí.[1] It was Buñuel’s first film and was initially released in 1929 with a limited showing at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.
Un Chien Andalou has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later” without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes. [Link: Wikipedia.]
Dreams That Money Can Buy is a 1947 experimental feature color film written, produced, and directed by surrealist artist and dada film-theorist Hans Richter.
Collaborators included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger. The film won the Award for the Best Original Contribution to the Progress of Cinematography at the 1947 Venice Film Festival. [Source: Wikipedia]
David Lynch is famous for his reluctance to verbally explain or clarify his work, so why is the work itself so frequently accompanied by words?
Four simple guidelines to watching films made by director David Lynch.
David Lynch In Conversation with David Stratton. On Saturday 14 March 2015, in this exclusive to Brisbane, David Lynch shared insights into his life, his work and his many passions – painting, film, music, and meditation.
“Reality is a mirror, what you think becomes what you believe.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky
One of the legends of ’70s cinema, a vanguard of the midnight movie, and just as famous for films he didn’t make as the films he did, Jodorowsky is not an artist whose body of work can be easily described. Cineastes around the world have been waiting for something new since the release of “Santa Sangre” in 1989, and in celebration of his new feature, “The Dance Of Reality,” SXSW proudly presents an hour-long conversation with one of the masters of surrealist cinema, Alejandro Jodorowsky. The conversation will be moderated by HitFix’s Drew McWeeny.
For many years, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has been dedicated to the practice of tarot as a source of psychological insight and creative inspiration. As part of this evening’s special program, please join Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, and the artist for a conversation about Jodorowsky’s forthcoming film “Endless Poetry,” the autobiographical sequel to “The Dance of Reality,” and a one-time public reading for select audience members.
My surreal paintings are taken from scenes in everyday life that have a quality that is strange or otherworldly. For a number of first wave surrealist painters emptiness was a significant feature in the art. De Chirico and Dali both drew heavily from scenes expressing existential void. My work focuses on the altered landscape and cultural emptiness. Photographs I take are the basis for the paintings. I choose dead malls, places left behind, and blank billboards for my subjects. Colors in my work are pushed to reference emotions, climate change, nuclear reality, and artificial life. Rather than illustrate things and landscape in a Disney like fantasy way I paint scenes from real life that already appear surreal.
