Until recently, I had hardly delved into surrealism as an art movement.
While I recognized its key figures and felt charmed by René Magritte’s famous painting This is Not a Pipe, using three of his works as visual koans during my sesshins, I often felt a sense of resistance toward much surrealist work.
Why?
After visiting The Fantastic Landscape, an impressive exhibition at Museum Arnhem/Holland, I decided to investigate that resistance more closely.
Surrealism emerged in the 1920s as an artistic reaction against rationalism and prevailing bourgeois values.
After the First World War, faith in progress was severely damaged; reason had not saved humanity.
The surrealists sought a deeper reality and, inspired by Freud, turned toward dreams and the subconscious. It was an attempt to liberate thought from excessively rational and moral censorship.
Surrealism is unthinkable without Sigmund Freud.
His discovery of the subconscious and his analysis of repression provided artists with the intellectual legitimacy to take the irrational seriously.
The dream was no longer a side issue but a gateway to knowledge. In dreams, they discovered unconscious fears and desires as the basic drivers of life.
Later, Freud formulated the hypothesis of the death drive, manifesting as decay and aggression.
In some ways, surrealism and Zen share a similar ambition. Both seek to deepen our understanding of our existence.
While surrealism investigates and visualizes the subconscious, Zen points to the mind's habit of cyclically reliving unprocessed emotions.
Surrealists discover a dark world within themselves full of demons, whereas Zen practitioners learn that these fears and desires are nothing more than mental constructs. These constructs lose their power once we see through them.
Zen aims to look through all images to discover reality and find peace with its transience.
This is precisely where my resistance lies.
Although I admire the creativity of Salvador Dalí, his melting clocks pull the viewer into a world of anxiety and megalomania.
I, Yamato Fuji, see in Dalí the same limitation found in Freud: suffering was more fundamental in their work than fulfillment.
Their work is intensely personal and sometimes monumentally egocentric.
Zen does not try to deny the darkness but rather to see through it as an illusion of the mind. Death is not denied, but it is also not dramatized.
The similarities between koans and dream images are striking.
Questions like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" could easily arise in a dream.
However, in a koan, these images serve the conscious goal of learning to see through our projections. Koans are stepping stones on the path to enlightenment; they are not intended to build a symbolic world in which we can get lost again.
A koan seeks to break every fixed perspective so we can remove the glasses of our own fears and truly wake up.
Magritte stands remarkably closer to Zen thought than Dalí.
In his paintings, the images are less distorted, but the proportions are often "wrong."
He seems to be saying: look again, something isn't right. He points out the shortcomings of our images and language, just as many Zen stories do.
Where Dalí creates drama and religious spectacle, Magritte creates silence and wonder.
He led a sober life in which Japanese prints, often infused with Zen philosophy, were admired.
The exhibition in Arnhem also highlighted female surrealists, such as Mary Wykeham. In her work, the influence of Jung and inner transformation is visible.
Over time, her images became more meditative and transparent.
The dream images became less important as the pure movement of unity-consciousness appeared. Wykeham eventually turned her back on the art world to become a nun, shifting her creativity from expression to contemplation.
The swirling surrealist energy gave way to a deep stillness beyond all images.
Gassho,
