The
following excerpt is from:
Preface
to the Catalogue of the International Surrealist Exhibition
Andre
Breton, (London, 1936),
translated by David Gascoyne.
Painting,
for instance, was until recently preoccupied almost exclusively
with expressing the manifest relationships between external perception
and the ego. The expression of this relationship became more and
more deceptive and insufficient in proportion as it became less
possible for it to attempt to enlarge and deepen man's 'perception-consciousness'
system, whose most interesting artistic possibilities it had long
since exhausted, leaving only that extravagant attention to external
details of which the work of any of the great 'realist' painters
bears the mark. By mechanizing the plastic method of representation
to the extreme, photography dealt a final blow to all this. Painting
was forced to beat a retreat and to retrench itself behind the necessity
of expressing internal perception visually. I cannot insist too
much on the fact that this place of exile was the only one left
to it.
The only domain that the artist could exploit became that of purely
mental representation, in so far as it extends beyond that of real
perception, without therefore becoming one with the domain of hallucination.
But here it should be recognized that the two domains are by no
means clearly separated, and that all attempts at delimitation are
open to dispute. What is important is that mental representation
(in the object's physical absence) provides, as Freud
has said, 'sensations related to processes taking place on different
levels of the mental personality, even the most profound'. The necessarily
more and more systematic exploration of these sensations in art
is working towards the abolition of the ego in the id, and is thereupon
forced to make the pleasure principle predominate over the reality
principle. It tends to give ever greater freedom to instinctive
impulses, and to break down the barrier raised before civilised
man, a barrier which the primitive and the child ignore. The social
importance of such an attitude, if one takes account of the general
disturbance of the sensibility that it entails (shifting of considerable
psychic burdens on to the constituent elements of the perception-consciousness
system), on the one hand, and of the impossibility of going back
to the former position, on the other, is tremendous.
Is that to say that the reality of the exterior world has become
subject to caution for the artist constrained to draw the elements
of his work from internal perception? To maintain that this was
so would be witness either to a great poverty of thought or to extremely
bad faith. In the mental domain just as in the physical domain,
it is clear that there could be no question of 'spontaneous generation'.
Surrealist painters could not bring even the most evidently free
of their creations to light were it not for the 'visual remains'
of external perceptions. It is only by regrouping these disorganised
elements that they are able to reclaim both their individual and
their collective rights at once. The genius of these painters will
eventually appear to rest not so much on the always relative novelty
of their subject matter, as on the more or less great initiative
they display when it is a question of making use of this subject
matter.
So it is that the whole technical effort of surrealism, from its
origins until today, has consisted in multiplying the ways of reaching
the most profound levels of the mental personality.
