To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass)

In today’s society, it might seem strange to think that the essence of monotheistic icons such as the Christian Madonna depicted in historical religious art have such a strong prevalence in the contemporary psyche. These symbols and motifs of religious worship have been displaced by secular alternatives. It is part of the obsession and collective consciousness of modern culture to follow patterns of ‘secular’ worship in such a consumer led, celebrity driven community. This is something that has been captured by artists throughout the 20 th and 21 st centuries. As a culture, a psychological consensus has emerged in a need to fixate on and create a hierarchy; a hierarchy that has built ‘celebrity’ as the apogee. Andy Warhol perhaps typifies the notion of celebrity idolatry with his ‘Andy Suits’, acting as catalysts to this movement. Warhol became a symbol for ‘the invented self’ as he underwent a disassociation with his interiority by adorning himself with a costume that transfo...

Salvador Dali arguably epitomises the Surrealist movement. Drawing upon Freudian ideas of the repressed unconscious mind, what Dali does is poses questions about what reality really is, and how we view it. His work and concepts are confrontational, setting up intense encounters with one’s dreams, phobias and inner disturbances in the most macabre way. The paranoiac critical method is something that Dali developed in order to achieve this illusionistic style in his paintings. Dali stated that the paranoiac critical method is a " spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena. " He was interested in ‘paranoia’ in the context of the mind; the mind can forge links between unrelated objects, invoking questions about the identity of form and matter. This evolves into what we see in most of Dali’s pieces, the Freudian dimension of identity and reality. The dream-like landsca...

Whilst visiting the ‘Tate St Ives’ it was interesting to see that amid the examples of naïve art with their more rudimentary expressions of perspective, and Hepworth’s sculptural forms, were some Dali-esque surrealist pieces. Centred in an environment where the art work is positioned to complement its coastal surroundings, often with a quietude that reflects more classical painting techniques, the idiosyncrasy of the gallery spacing allowed the surrealist art to juxtapose its naturalistic neighbours. Sir Roland Penrose’s ‘ Le Grand Jour’ was intriguing. Penrose himself had connections to Cornwall yet unlike the modernist, earthy formations by Hepworth drawn from the geographical textures of the landscape, he found exhilaration and urgency. In the painting Penrose delineates how structural mapping in art can invoke a synthesis of unrelated subjects; perhaps it is this geometry in the work that urges a viewer to psychologically forge these interrelations between ‘fish’ and ‘ringma...