1930년대 초현실주의 전시를 통해 본 초현실의 사회적 의미

Abstract

Surrealists have proclaimed the need for revolution for human liberation from the beginning of their movement. They believed that art and politics could coexist, and that artistic creation destroying the established social rules could be a political act. Surrealist movement can be regarded as the process to solve the gap between art creation and political act, while pursuing the absolute reality of the surreal. Surrealists especially emphasized the social role of exhibitions. A surrealist exhibition was not merely a venue of aesthetic experiment but a place of political action to change the world by socializing the absolute reality. In particular, the surrealist exhibitions of the 1930s, when Stalinism and Nazism prevailed, played the role of European avant-garde artists’ front line, struggling against fascism. Through the international surrealist exhibitions held in 1930s, surrealists forged a transnational community based on libido extant inside of all human beings. Surrealists identified libido as creative impulse that was the evidence of human existence, and considered it as revolutionary power to overcome the established system of capitalist and fascist societies, which make humans as tools of mechanical production. Surrealists considered primitive tribal communities based on natural human instincts as a model of surrealist society, which is the truly productive commune that creates objects mediating material and spiritual world. Surrealist exhibitions in the 1930s have presented a vision of ideal society, in which human beings associate with the universal power of human creativity without any hierarchy. Surrealists suggested a possibility of realization of the surreal as a social form through the exhibitions. The author concludes that the surreal is not an ‘utopia’ as a transcendental ideal, but a communal reality that is made possible by universal solidarity among the properties already existing in human beings.