Surrealism is a cultural movement dedicated to unnerving, illogical scenes that resolve the waking world with that of dreams. A response to existentialism at the turn of the 19th century, it eliminated objectivity, compelling people to observe the world in a novel way. The genre has a tendency to display uncomfortable, hyper-realistic portrayals of all-too familiar dreamscapes.

Surrealism forces us to confront our own subconscious. Accordingly, the famous theories and methods of Sigmund Freud regarding the subconscious were a major influencer of the movement. The literature of authors like Franz Kafka, often utilizing Freudian symbols, paved the way for the movement to take hold. Soon, Andre Breton would write the “Manifesto of Surrealism”, alluding to Freud’s ideas about the meaningfulness of dreams and the subconscious. At one point in the Manifesto, Breton suggests that the dream world is the true nature of reality, and our waking lives are simply an interference (1924).

René Magritte became well known among the surrealist artists for his witty, thought provoking work. As was common among the surrealist artists, Magritte thought of himself more as a thinker than a painter. He used images as tools to demonstrate the abstract concepts he investigated. One of Magritte’s most famous and controversial paintings, The Treachery of Images (1929), generated dialogue about the roles of art, resemblance, and language. The piece displays a painting of a pipe, with the words written underneath, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” translated: “This is not a pipe.” In stark contrast to the artwork of previous periods, Magritte used common language to present an abstract concept to the observer.

“The famous pipe.” Said Magritte. “How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe’, I’d have been lying!” (Torczyner 1977). Through this seemingly paradoxical work, Magritte obscured the significance and authenticity that we attribute to images. Indeed, the artwork is not a pipe, but simply a two-dimensional representation of a pipe. Magritte induced thought about the characteristics of language and our tendency to regard imagery as reality. He used the fallacy of the role of resemblance to make an argument against it, forcing us to reevaluate resemblance altogether.

In 1967, Guy Debord published “Society of the Spectacle,” a work of philosophical and Marxist theory that criticized mass media for problems like the fetishization of commodities, reification, and alienation. Debord introduced the concept of a spectacle as “fragmented views of reality” regrouped into a “separate pseudo-world” of images. While perhaps Debord utilized the term “images” in a broader sense than Magritte, I imagine modern society as a vast art museum of our own design. We all are pretending to live the lives of the paintings, because we feel we must — it is inherent to the system. Our lives in the paintings are real to us, and the images become increasingly powerful and authentic as the system grows. We become alienated from the world and from each other, although we convince ourselves we are more united than ever.

Debord explained that the development of modern society has long been shifting from “being” to “having”, and from “having” to “appearing”. He noted that (even before the all-too-literal demonstration of this idea through social media) humans have been living “unconsciously” — devoid of critical thought — as the spectacle grows. In other words, the media has been contributing to a problematic societal function long before the metaphorical ‘art museum’ was made literal in the form of an Instagram app.

Just as the surrealists’ work gave shape to the nightmarish world of our subconscious one-hundred years ago, so our subconscious has formed a new dreamscape facilitated by modern media. In “Society of the Spectacle,” Debord often noted that the spectacle presents, disingenuously, the perception that certain elements of society cannot be questioned or changed. Just as The Treachery of Images challenged the natural assumptions of perception 40 years prior, we must understand that the understandings of reality we hold dear are not as stable as they appear. As Magritte’s painting is a representation of a pipe, the world perpetrated by modern media is also a representation. Together, these works present a sliver of hope that what we think we know is not objective reality, but simply a rendition of it. With this knowledge, we can exceed anything that is believed possible.