How best would you describe the “un-canniness” of the surrealist use of dolls and mannequins?

We project meaning into the human form, in whatever scale. The viewer identifies with the figure in paintings especially when it is seen from behind; a separate personality is not evident, and that enables imagination to become that figure, as seeing the environment of the painting with its eyes. Similarly, dolls and mannequins echo the human form, but without individuality. Because of this we can animate them —inanimate forms — with our own excess energy, the energy of the imagination.

The Surrealists seemed to suggest that if we are going to save ourselves from annihilation in modern culture, we must break completely from reason — logical thinking. But if we were to break entirely from logic and reason, wouldn’t we cease to exist as being truly human?

To be doctrinaire, the Manifestoes say that we must break from the dominance of reason. Ironically, Breton in the Manifestoes of Surrealism uses logic to argue for its demise. The Surrealists were against the limitations of causal thinking, that endless litany of cause and effect, which short-circuited imagination. Imaginative thinking is associative, creative, unpredictable, and revelatory. Seeking such a direct realization of the imagination, the Surrealists rejected the realism of retinal vision (the slicing of the eye in Un chien andalou) in favor of imagination’s internal world.

In their polemics the Surrealists argued about the limitations of reason; their ideas are expressed sequentially — in itself a reasonable structuring of thought. But in their art and poetry, they abandon the dependence on seamless sequence to use right-angled changes of direction, associations, and surprising images that coalesce into the surreal experience.

As artists and poets who argue for the authority of the imagination, we still use reason — but as a weapon against scientific positivism, its strained vocabulary and academic propensity to favor the database over the vivid embodiment of feeling.

Our culture has gone so far into functional commodity and instrumental use of others, that it has obliterated the play of imagination, except in advertising and in the marginal world of artists.

I don’t know if we would not be human without reason and logic. Logic is a construct based on observation — empiricism — but observation gives more than logic, it inspires the imagination. Human culture developed for many years without an explicit use of logic, but through its material expressions in art, music, architecture, agriculture, and medicine. I think it is a question of proportion, of what we value as knowledge. Our culture has gone so far into functional commodity and instrumental use of others, that it has obliterated the play of imagination, except in advertising and the marginal world of artists.