Man’s Dark Interior: Surrealism, Viscera and The Anatomical Imaginary

Born of the sociocultural effervescence that swept through Europe in the years following the First World War, Surrealism represented a profound disillusionment towards the established intellectual order that it held responsible for the dehumanising and violent depths to which civilisation had so recently sunk. Decrying the inadequacy of postwar philosophies and politics to deal with the new, brutalised world of the interwar period, the Surrealists loudly championed a revolution of perception by replacing the certainties of prewar thought with the unpredictable discontinuities of non-Euclidean geometry, the base materialism of Georges Bataille and, most especially, the dark visions of the human psyche that emerged through Freudian psychoanalysis.