Surrealism

Definition

Surrealism is the 20th-century avant-garde movement (Breton, Ernst, Dalí) that sought to liberate the unconscious through automatic writing, dream imagery, and the uncanny juxtaposition of everyday objects. Benjamin was deeply indebted to surrealism's method: the discovery of the "revolutionary energies" latent in the "outmoded" — the old-fashioned objects, arcades, and urban residues that surrealism's attention redeems. Benjamin's own montage method draws on surrealist juxtaposition, and his concept of the dialectical image can be read as a politically-charged surrealism: the flash in which the dream of the 19th century becomes legible as the prehistory of capitalist catastrophe. For architecture, surrealism opens a way of thinking the built environment not as functional order but as the site of the uncanny, the repressed, and the revolutionary — a thread connecting surrealism to Vidler's architectural uncanny and to the Situationists' détournement.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — surrealism as the redemption of the outmoded; revolutionary energies in urban detritus.
• Max Ernst — key surrealist artist; Benjamin engaged with surrealist visual practice.

Related Concepts

• Montage — the compositional method Benjamin learned from surrealism.
• Arcades — the "outmoded" urban form surrealism teaches us to read.
• Dialectical Image — photography and surrealism's charged flash of recognition.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — Benjamin's debt to surrealism.