Expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious

March 7, 2016 1:49 PM

Oh So Surreal: - Pop Surrealism and Lowbrow Art; featuring interviews and work from artists as diverse as Mr Mead | SSSdolls | Joseph Loughborough | Nicomi Nix Turner | Millie Brown | Filthy the Bear | Jean Paul Bourdier and many more. Click through the categories or scroll down the sidebars and be amazed or disgusted or meh.
posted by adamvasco (4 comments total)

I have been a hard-core Surrealist pretty much forever. Max Ernst is my favorite artist. Luis Buñuel is the greatest. Just like Breton, I turned my back on Dali. I followed the work of Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, and their work in keeping the flame alive in Chicago--and elsewhere. As a high-brow elitist Surrealist, I looked at this kind of stuff as low-brow surrealism before the term was coined. I would also sometimes call it stoner art.

But I give up. The work on this site is amazing, and trying to stay faithful to the century-old Breton cult is a silly enterprise. Yeah, some of this stuff is a little cartoonish, but either these artists are getting better or I'm becoming less of a snob. I even started subscribing to Juxtapoz a couple of months ago...only to find out that they have started to broaden the spectrum of art they pay attention to, which used to be almost exclusively along the lines of these artists.
posted by kozad at 3:55 PM on March 7, 2016

I'm not a big fan of this stuff—I am the unreformed version of kozad—but if it's to your taste, you will probably also appreciate Hi-Fructose.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:57 PM on March 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the art!
posted by benito.strauss at 6:29 PM on March 7, 2016

Thanks for coming along kozad and escape from the potato planet.
I too used to be an unreformed sort of surrealist but all things tend to evolve whether you want them too or not.
Nowadays there are, if not millions, very many artists operating in what they or others call a surrealistic vein.
Some are very talented and others not so much, but all art is subjective anyway.
What I personally love more than anything else about the old school Surrealists was their flowing collaboration with
one another within an ill defined squabbling school of thought and ideas.
The pop surrealists not so much but their are some movements within this such as the Beinart Surreal project which are worth a look at.
Then there are the slightly more old school Manticore
and Robber Baron which still honour the the literary as well as plastic art tradition.
The other glorious legacy of old school Surrealism was the International penetration it achieved and this is hopefully being fostered by International Surrealism Now
posted by adamvasco at 7:36 AM on March 8, 2016