Area of Specialisation: Surrealism

Surrealism is a modern art movement which is about the unconscious mind, the dream, the surreal world which the Surrealist saw as being the real behind the real, meaning that it is something which is real but we cannot realize it for we are spending too much of our attention on the real that we unlikely consider the real behind what we see as real, for example in our dreams we can see touch, feel, and hear, yet the things we dream are not really happening at the moment. We have an ability of dreaming of someone we never seen for years yet their voice and body movement is still the same as it was used to, therefore our brains have the power to bringing to life what we thought is no longer there, something which was real and now it moved behind the real that is real yet still it is hard to figure it out. Without this Surrealism movement the world would be boring today because we would be able to predict everything as we already know the function of the human body and nature, it would really be hard to impress people. Therefore the addition of Surrealism to the world has brought curiousity of how the real behind the real works, meaning that I may not have the ability to understand my own dreams but would be interested and may understand someone else's when they tell me about them.

Surrealism (art):

 

Surrealism (gaming):

Without Surrealism we wouldn't have had a special childhood where we enjoy playing as a character of Super Mario, a Italian plumber who looks Mexican and eats mushrooms in order to grow up, can spit fireballs and jumps on tittles for a living, he can break brick with his head but he dies when he touches a turtle, but its okay because "what doesn't kill you only makes you smaller"- Super Mario. All this makes sense when one has the controller and is playing the game.

Surrealism (design):

Surrealism (cinema):

If human being were not as clever to posses surrealist thought we would never ever though of a possibility of a human being flying, and even go to the extreme that the being is so strong that they cannot have scratches, wounds or dirt anywhere near them when they fight villains, we would not have the movie of the strongest hero in the world, but just to balance everything, make him be the weakest person on earth if a crystal is in his radius.

Surrealist (fashion):

Surrealism (literature):

Dada Collage

Dadaism is an art movement of the 20th century and was all about moving away from everything, one would say that this was a type of art which mocks art itself, the Dadaists wanted art to stand alone without representing anything, Dada had to be like nothing else. There the Dadaists were amongst the first to introduce new tools to the art industry such as collages, mass produced objects and their own literature with poem consisting of just sounds and no intended meaning to them, see the Dadaists were all about chance. As graphic design students we ourselves had to enjoy  a moment of the 1916's and create art using their style, the following is a Dada collage titled "Life is Exciting" by Laone K Kwati where he uses all which we value in the modern world although it is stressful, doesn't has to have meaning, remember that.

 

World War II - the atomic bomb

The atomic bomb is a nuclear weapon which was made by the United States during the time of the World War II and was dropped on Japan Hiroshima, three days later another one was dropped on Nagasaki. The bomb had a uranium-235 filling and weighed 4 400 kg and 10 feet in length, this atomic bomb below was named "the Little Boy", way too ironic for how much damage a little boy can do, the Little Boy is the nuclear weapon which was dropped at Hiroshima.

The Little Boy:

An atomic boy is a weapon of mass destruction which causes a cloud of smoke in a mushroom form that it is called a mushroom cloud. 

Mushroom:

 

Mushroom cloud:

 

A nuclear weapon can cause radiation to those exposed to it and even from interaction with those exposed to its chemicals, These are some of the survivors and those who had been too close to the survivors:

With so much damage being done after the dropping of the bombs, the people had to try to limit this threat by creating anti-nuke or anti-nuclear movements so that such does not happen again with masses of people protesting against nuclear power plants.

Utopias and Manifestos

First of all we've already dealt with the term Utopia earlier this year, which we defined as what one would see as a perfect dream world where everything is all purely good and everyone is happy to live during that time period. Now a manifesto is a public declaration of one's (or even belonging to a group) policy of aims, this is usually a written piece of announcement of some goals which had never been thought of before. People had been writing manifestos for years in which they identify their utopian ideals and what they see as to be the recipe for a "perfect world", one of these people which wrote a manifesto was Philippo Marinetti and he wrote a manifesto to accompany an art movement which he was the founder of, the Futurist movement. In the manifesto he introduces the new art as something which consists of speed, movement and simultaneity. Another art movement which was accompanied by a manifesto was the Dada movement and the De Stijl movement in which the authors of these manifestos also describe the art of that specific movement as something which had never been done before that is the primary reason these people were labelled the avante garde (people way ahead of their time). The following is a copy of a manifesto by the two MGI (Midrand Graduate Institute) in Bloemfontein in which they describe and give an idea of how today's youth would describe someone with an utopian ideal:

As things are in the modern day, it is very hard as an artist to come up with a different style of art that has not yet been created. The reason I say that is because everything has been done! Even mixing different styles to try and form your own has been redone many times. Although we have different styles of art, artists today sort of like plagiarize past artists like Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh and many others. Today it is very hard to be a successful artist because your art will be constantly compared to paintings like the three women by Otto, and even crazy works like the fountain by mutt.

The only way for an artist to stay relevant in today’s world is to tell himself that although whatever it is he dreams of doing has been done, he will just do it either way so he gets it out of the way. It is true that many art styles has been accomplished but no two people can experience or present something in the same way although it is one theme or concept.Therefore the artist should stay true to himself, follow his heart and make peace with the fact he won’t come with anything that might be that new to the world but can present something new using the old ways of doing it.

Art in today’s world is being used mainly as a political tool, either for or against certain political values or in short we should say is being used as political satire or metaphors to ridicule stupidity within the political system. Although some artists express themselves in an explicit and controversial way when painting political images they bring in other elements that have the power to influence a country in a negative way. A perfect example of the above mentioned situation would be the picture dubbed “The spear” because it took us a step backward in terms of fighting racism, although the person depicted does act in the manner that the image suggest.

As the Futurists suggested that with technology making everything easier and mass productions causes things to be made faster, today manifesto is simply seen as an article or a facebook post or note judging by people's reaction to it. The current generation is mostly interested in the future and seem to be bored with everything of the past as time changes they do not expect to live as their parents and grandparents lived because of the way technology has an influence on everyone's lives and causing them to desire urbanisation more. We cannot exercise our cultural traditions anymore because of how the Western  lifestyles had an influence on our lifestyles and values, the transition of our lifestyles from the villages to the urban modern world happened too quickly and with the simultaneity of too many things happening at the same time that all we want is a break from everything else including, school, studying, work, relationships, people and everything. It is hard to be recognized in anything these days as there is way too much competition and people who works harder than you with some even doing better than you would ever do without giving yourself any sleep and they doing it without even trying their best.