Peter McCombs wrote:

> 
> I think that a lot of people think of "Surrealism" as pretty much "anything
> goes."

So do I,... on both counts.

  And so I see a lot of images that I would term abstract instead of
> surreal. 

Historically surrealism had its abstractionist/formalist strain, 
epitomized by artists like Arp and Miro.  Indeed almost every major 
strain of 20th century art has some surrealist analogue.

On the other other hand, I see some images that use abstract
> components that are arranged in a surrealistic manner,
  and this makes it
> difficult to judge, and it gets really subjective at that point

Subjective and self-consuming.

> 
> My biggest problem with this round is that many of the really surrealistic-
> feeling images recycled old ideas from established artists in the genre.
> I got particularly tired of the clock theme from Dali, and one particular
> image that I had rated very highly on the first pass, moved down considerably
> after going back to it later. My own entry leaned on old cliches; perhaps
> the whole topic is a bit worn out.

Yet aren't these cliches precisely how we think of surrealism?

Surrealism had Dadaist roots and its agenda of attacking bourgeois 
values easily devolves into a general license to be garish.  Surrealism 
as an art movement had already become vulgarized when along came the 
psychedelia of the sixties/seventies.  Album covers, posters, and other 
vehicles of pop culture, celebrating the hallucinagenic experiences of 
the mind, revived surrealism in a doppelganger of organic whorls and 
pictorial contrivances. Our view of the movement, refracted through 
these excesses, has little hope of retrieving much. It all seems to 
collapse on itself when the introduction of randomness and process in 
raytracing takes the particular form of noise functions and their 
signature bozo patterns.  Yet with what other topic can we enjoy the
garish appeal?

> 
> Anyway - back to your comment - when I see those images that "don't
> relate to anything real," as you put it, I get very suspicious that what
> I am seeing is in fact an abstract work rather than a surrealistic one. A very
> common trait of Surrealism is that the objects are usually very recognizable,
> perhaps normal at first glance, but obviously there is something "strange" 
> about them. 

Basically that is how Dali revived surrealism the first time.  Art 
historians might point to the fondness for mixing visual and tactile 
pleasure.

The best surrealistic images, I thought, were the ones where the
> author wasn't exactly sure what it meant. Some artists tried to tell a story
> with their entries, or tried to make every little thing significant. Upon
> reading their descriptions, their work moved from the surreal to the concrete
> because the whole thing had been explained to me.

Well put. As if... with pictorial constraints lifted, we can juxtapose 
objects as ideas and finally manufacture a meaning? Not what the 
originators had in mind.  I agree with your analysis, yet with the 
devalued state of surrealism I even found that this approach could be 
permitted if I thought about it too much.

>  
> Significance in surrealism is accidental, the content is recognizable, yet
> bizarre. I found that most entries didn't match this criteria, hence lots
> of low concept scores. I must admit that there was some beautiful art this 
> round, though. I gave out a number of 20s on that aspect. :)

A decent attempt on your part to extract some kind of consistency. 
Maybe because I participated myself, or maybe because the topic turned 
out to be quite difficult, I found I was sympathetic to the plight of 
this round's entries. There were, as you say, some beautiful images. But 
I gave few high marks.  Oddly, in the midst of all my analytical 
confusion, I had no trouble deciding which pictures I liked and which I 
didn't.

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