Maya in Wonderland

Women surrealists were analogous to the central character in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and its sequel , "Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There".These classic childrens' tales written by Charles L Dodgeson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll in 1865 and 1871 respectively and translated into numerous languages.This literary sensation  was not only the most popular children's story in history but also one of the foremost examples of nonsense writing for adults inspiring an abundance of fantasy literature both in high art and popular culture.Alice, like the female surrealists, ignored proscribed societal limitations, traveling conceptually as well as geographically to explore new worlds.

In her 1944 film "At Land " ,Maya Deren created her own mythological voyage of the twentieth century in a non linear narrative that refers to earlier literature sources including Carroll's novel.Her film " Meshes of the Afternoon"seems to investigate the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations.The loose repetition and rhythm cuts short any expectations of a conventional narrative, heightening the dreamlike qualities.As with her other films on self representation, Deren navigates conflicting tendencies of the self and the "other", through doubling, multiplication and merging of the woman in the film.Following a dreamlike quest with allegorical complexity the film has an enigmatic structure and a loose affinity with both film noir and domestic melodrama.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVMV0j6XVGU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSY0TA-ttMA

Guided by the invisible

Surrealism the art movement was the child from the marriage of the minds of two men Andre Breton and Sigmond Frued.In Freud's theory of the unconscious, Breton discovered the way to access the realm inhabited by the self and he described it as "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella."Surrealism became the poetic springboard for a new art the new found context in which the self and its vicissitudes could be observed as well as experienced.Surrealism became the source of two current;the imagined which arose from the intellect and the intuited which arose from experience.

The surrealist-painter, poet, photographer sought to unfold his world of fantasy, be it daydream or nightmare, the world where his perceptions meet what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious.In these hidden depths mankind is revealed in symbols and  to those who learn this visual non verbal language of forms the half concealed becomes deeply and richly revealed.Surrealism might deal with dreams, fantasy, nightmares ,voyages one has never made or an insistence on openness to the unexpected in everyday world-the sheer strangeness of people and objects encountered by chance. 


There is a degree of truth in surrealism since the images are born from experiences or a sense of deja vu."I think everything we do is autobiographical.So one of my reasons for painting was really to escape my biography.Autobiography in any case is not a blatant lie.It is at best a distorting mirror." Dorthea Tanning.

Dorthea Tanning "Birthday" .Most of the art was self referential in nature.Portraiture dominated and self portraiture was essential whether presented as a straightforward depiction or as an autobiographical story or as a symbolic still life.


Children think in idiosyncratic images until they learn words to symbolize them and when afraid they assume their fears come from outside rather than from within.To assuage their uneasiness they might invent irrational explanations such as interpreting a noise caused by a monster hiding somewhere in the room.Childhood experiences informed the iconography of Alice Rahon and Remidios Varo.Rahon spent three years of her early childhood in France immobolized in a cast that went from neck to ankles.While she spent long periods in the garden alone nature nurtured her thoughts.She began painting childlike impressions from nature.Varo struggled over the conflict between dependency and autonomy which is reflected in her work.

Remidios Varo's difficulty in sepearating and individuating is expressed by a figure, paralyzed by inertia,who appears to lose her identity becoming like the chair she sits on in "Mimicry"

Rahon reacts as a child might, wondering about the pain that exploding fireworks will inflict on seven Judas dolls in "Piedad por los judas (Mercy for the Judas Effigies)

The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists

Surrealism began with poet Andre Breton's belief that the limitations of rationality and of fixed categories of meaning could be overcome through a new syntheses of the conscious and unconscious, dream and waking.It was a new path was aimed at liberating the dream and the conscious as creative forces.

Women artists adapted surrealism to new, cultural and personal situations.They sought to establish links between the movement's focus on using chance, dreams and the erotic as creative stimuli and contemporary artistic practices.

Surrealists sought new ways of expressing irrationality associated with economic depression and war in works of art that rejected earlier models of realism and abstraction.Artists like Louise Bourgeoise never considered herself a surrealist yet her works displayed the influence of surrealist ideas about corporeal metamorphosis,the disquieting power of the object and the relationship between nature and culture.

As Whitney Chadwick succinctly put it in her groundbreaking Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement,"Surrealism offered many women their first glimpse of a world in which creative activity and liberation from family imposed social expectations might coexist, one in which rebellion was viewed as a virtue,imagination as a passport to more liberated life."

How does surrealism by male artists differ from surrealism by their female counterparts?

1.Brenton accorded erotic desire and psychoanalytic principles of male psychosexual development are redirected to the production of iconographies of the feminine unconscious as is manifested in dreams, automatic writing and the erotic.

2.The male surrealists embrace of the radical often aggressive interventions into the materiality of objects becomes an extended exploration of the body as perceived from within rather than an assault on the body from without.

3. Women artists made surrealism something uniquely their own.The surrealist cultivation of rupture and disruption becomes, in the hands of many women artists , a means to the formation of new narrative structures that explore the sources of women's knowledge and power through their relationships to nature and culture to animal and human and to the psychic avatar and the spirit guide.

4. Women were the agency by which male surrealists created.Although their ideology was revolutionary in its challenge of the established social institutions of church, marriage and family, male surrealists were misogynists in their denial of woman's ability to create art.The female often began as wives, lovers of a circle of men around Brenton and his followers(Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington,Kay Sage, Remidios Varo, Alice Rahon)Surrealism granted these women a freedom that no previous aesthetic had offered.Yet for many of them, their development flourished only after they were physically distant from Paris and its art circles.The female surrealists ignored proscribed societal limitations traveling conceptually as well as geographically to explore new worlds.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Uncertainty is an essential category

In the words of William Kentridge "The idea is to start with a fragment of something imminent.An impulse, a phrase , a quote or an image and then work on till you can  make sense of it.You can mix up scenes through a process of accretion till the story finds itself a structure and a subject.It is more about the process of construction from fragments that one later reinterprets.A demonstration of how we make sense of the world rather than a reenactment of what the world means to us.It is not a process of facts and figures but rather a process of gradual unfolding.There is uncertainty at the start, an absence of a definite script or a storyboard and an emblematic way in which we understand the world.We do not have access to the complete information.We cannot take it in.We take in fragments- a photograph ,a memory , a dream,  a headline, a phone conversation and through these fragments we can create a walking collage of thoughts and ideas.It involves tracking parts of the brain that defies rational planning or conscious thoughts.We must allow an openness for something to happen at the fringes or the edges. The key is not to know the answer, to hang onto as long as possible, to provisionality and uncertainty.It involves giving an idea a benefit of doubt. Even it it might seem to fail in the beginning, you might realize later that it has tremendous potential or something that looks flawless and workable in the beginning might seem a failure towards the end but this a risk you have to take as an artist.For me using autobiographical elements is essential- like my memories, prejudices, rationality,history, readings of texts are collected together as visual metaphors that are projected on the physical work.The work itself is a physical embodiment of ideas using materials such as paper, clay, wood, steel.You have to make a series of practical decisions and considerations in the hope that in the end you will arrive at what you were thinking in your subconscious mind."