the dislocation of dreams. Coming as it did on the coat-tails of Freudian
psychoanalysis, it even acquired the heft of scientific inquiry. Any con-
fusion now could be attributed to the workings of the super ego, not the
failings of the artist.
In mystery we have a virtue that can quickly lapse into vice. There is
no enlightenment without surprise, but every surprise doesn’t generate
enlightenment. Since surprise is a response that is easily triggered, how
can we tell when it is legitimately used? Incoherence always has had a
certain cryptic allure (how else to explain the perpetual appeal of The
Book of Revelation?). But an enigma needs the coherence of veiled
meaning; it must surprise, but not confuse. The difference here is
between the mysterious, which permeates life, and mysticism, which is
nothing more than a commitment to all things mysterious. As outlandish
as the vocabulary of dreams can be, it emanates from a specific reality.
If anything these nocturnal images have a meaning that reality lacks
because a mind creates them out of its memories and impulses. The sub-
conscious cannot exist without a harboring consciousness.
In the work of all the surrealists except Magritte (who anchored his
analogies in meaning with his witty titles), the unfolding consciousness
is largely absent. The strange idiom of dreams is exercised for its own
sake, solely to signal how “weird” (read “unique”) the dreamer (read
“artist”) really is. Dali’s outlandish paintings exist merely to license
Dali’s outlandish behavior. While Freudians read too much meaning into
dreams, Surrealists read too little. Like locking a gum drop in a vault,
the prize doesn’t justify the effort needed to extract it. As with oriental-
ism in the nineteenthcentury, the enigmatic supplied the surrealists with
nothing more than an exotic texture. Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights
is that rare example of an authentically strange vision’s ability to endure.
For the synthetic enigmas of surrealism, however, the future seems less
promising: sphinxes rarely outlive their riddles.
Surrealism’s hollow core derives from its nihilistic progenitor: Dada.
More than any other artistic movement in the last century, Dada betrays
the inflated dominance of the artist. As Marcel Duchamp, that art critic
in artist’s clothing, famously said, an artist’s “intellectual expression” is
more important than any object he creates. An art that dispenses with art
only leaves the artist to be studied. The Dadaists felt that throwing the
baby out with the bathwater was permissible so long as the child’s father
did the throwing. The central concept might be characterized as “the
mediator is the message.”
There is something distinctly Unitarian in the dada movement’s reten-
tion of the artist, something bordering on “If you don’t believe in God
More Matter and Less Art 191