Contextual awareness

Context
helps us understand factors outside of artwork and what influenced its creation

• Historical context - what was happening at the time.
• Other contexts - consider economical, commercial factors and the client
• Looking at context in artwork helps judge importance in the work. 

Surrealism

• Occurred between world wars
• Andre Bretton - founding artist
• 'Revolutionary' movement
• Left wing values
• The unconscious
• Automatism - automatic drawing and writing
• The 'uncanny'

Rene Magritte

• Realist style of painting
• Subverting reality - feet merging into boots

Man Ray

• Photogram - Rayograms
• Objects - create shape
• Subverting truth
• Mental cohesion - doesn't all fit together
• Fantasy vs. reality

Max Ernst

• Collage - absurd images

Salvidor Dali - Lobster Telephone

• Use of shape - phone shape and lobster shape is similar

Salvidor Dali - The Persistence of Memory

• 'Ordinary scene' - calm yet harrowing
• Barren
• Melting clock - time
• Flaccid forms - Dali's fear of impotency
• Freudian

Where?

• Dreamlike environment

Why it is surrealist?

• Elements of unconscious using symbolism

Marcel Duchamp - 'The Fountain' 1917

• This piece ask's what art actually is?
• Urinal has changed it's context
• Challenging tradition
• Idea opposed to craft

Ready-Made

• Dadaism before surrealism

Post-modern architecture

• Modernism - cultural history, from the the 20th century  to 1970's
• Modernism is function not form
• Buildings would not use ornamentation and decoration - basic block like structure only small florishes used
• Relations to pieces of furniture

Experimental Jetset

• Combines typeface with a post-modernist flare
• Similar to David Carson
• Expressive
• Modernist graphics - message shown through words
• Post-modernist graphics - communicate through expression

Kitchen Aid

advertisement use's elements of surrealism as objects used are shown out of context such as floating and even possessing attributes that are not common for the appliances that are on show such as the electric mixing bowl that has wings and the cherry floating above the cup cake. This advert use's similar methods as Salvidor Dali's 'The Persistence of Memory' as the background shows a calm scene yet the foreground has more of a hectic style. The image also use’s a similar aspect the one of Freudian psychoanalysis as the objects could represent happiness as they would help in the kitchen this is shown by the happy, vibrant colour selection used in this advertisement.