What is the meaning behind surreal art?

[Mole]

[S1988]

I'm not sure. Perhaps the meaning behind avant-garde art works is subjective. Or, it's weird for its own sake.

[lorry]

Quote

Just as modern philosophy is dominated by the attempt to destroy the conceptual level of man’s consciousness and even the perceptual level, reducing man’s awareness to mere sensations—so modern art and literature are dominated by the attempt to disintegrate man’s consciousness and reduce it to mere sensations, to the “enjoyment” of meaningless colors, noises and moods.

The art of any given period or culture is a faithful mirror of that culture’s philosophy. If you see obscene, dismembered monstrosities leering at you from today’s esthetic mirrors—the aborted creations of mediocrity, irrationality and panic—you are seeing the embodied, concretized reality of the philosophical premises that dominate today’s culture. Only in this sense can those manifestations be called “art”—not by the intention or accomplishment of their perpetrators.

Rand - The Romantic Manifesto.

[ofd]

Gaslighting.

[Drew.]

The second one is clearly, "It's raining men" and an homage to a musical masterpiece.

Edit: Just noticed a few of those are form Salvador Dali. He made paintings that he saw when he was in a hypnogogic state

[alerdz5]

In my view of surrealist art what is being done is that, through the use of "surprise" and "unexpected juxtapositions", which are terms I read from the Wikipedia page, ordinary scenes are mixed up with surprising ingredients and that challenges assumptions about how life or specific situations "ought" to be. When elements that are typically present are replaced with other elements, the difference in what a person is used to and what a person is seeing can be rationalized or rejected for specific reasons on the part of the person and the experience of surprise can elicit a series of thoughts in the person that is unrelated to the depictions in the artwork at hand.

I was watching a surrealist film called The Holy Mountain and one of the scenes in the movie was of a man walking through a giant collection of Jesus statues, the man picked up a statue and walked away with it for 2 or 3 minutes while people pointed at him and laughed.

What I thought when i saw it was:

(Assuming Jesus existed, the god Jesus with godlike powers.)

There are various accounts of Jesus, one of these accounts is in the Bible, there are multiple forms of Christianity, Jesus is mentioned in the Quran, and with all the varying descriptions of Jesus, a common factor to all of the word-based claims of what Jesus was like is that they were delivered by humans.

If he was a god close to how he was depicted, it's possible that no declaration of what Jesus was like is accurate. At best, we have close replicas of his true form based on our abilities to describe what we see. A statue is a form of a replica, the person a statue is made to represent can do more than the statue - move, think, breathe, speak, etc..

I saw the man grabbing a Jesus statue as a method of expressing the idea that he was deciding what he thought Jesus was. He was choosing his interpretation of Jesus - either through a preexisting description or through making up his own concept of him.

I saw the people pointing and laughing as being those criticizing someone who is committed to their religion when that religion is not the same that the people are practicing.

To me, the statues communicated the idea that we can never know what Jesus was really like, we only have our interpretation of what he was like. As I'm reading Win Bigly by Scott Adams I see that it matches the idea of the human mind that he expresses, which is that human beings don't have a fully accurate map of the world, instead people have models which are useful to them.

The takeaway I had in it is that it provided an "art-based" communication of the idea that "reality is subjective". And people choosing to criticize others are in the same position as the people that are being criticized - which is holding an interpretation instead of what is real - the real Jesus or a fully accurate map of the world. I will clarify that I don't believe in that but seeing that part of the movie solidified the idea of subjectivism in my mind.

That is how I made sense of all of the Jesus statues piled on each other. The surprise element to it caught me off guard but I eventually made a connection that it could be about subjectivism. I can understand the interpretation that it is random details combined, and that could be what it really was in addition to most surrealist art. With the surprise element and the unexpected juxtapositions, surrealist art leaves an opening for a person to bring order to a confusing scene and it shakes up common associations, bringing the mental state that comes up with what is seen compared to what would have been seen, in the expectations of the viewer, opening up another opportunity for ideas emerging in the viewer's mind.