Modern European artists sought the sacred but rejected religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition. The sacred manifests itself in art from prehistory and onwards as an ineffable power that demands expression, embodiment, humility, or awe. The artist has an opening to the sacred through the imagination, because only through the imagination can one perceive its mutable power. If it exists, it exists as a feeling, in our perception of the world, and conceptually, in a worldview. One can hardly argue with a feeling, it is or isn’t there — that’s the beauty of it. Artists discover the sacred through their unwillingness to accept things as they are, to disregard the functional definitions of things, and uncover a poetic reality that contains depth.

The artist has an opening to the sacred through the imagination, because only through the imagination can one perceive its mutable power. If it exists, it exists as a feeling, in our perception of the world, as well as conceptually, in a worldview.

Initially modern art was attracted to a Platonic notion of the sacred as something pure, inviolable, and eternal. Hence, Kazimir Malevich’s suprematist squares. By contradiction, the Surrealists found the sacred as elemental, elusive, and dangerous — an amoral, erotic power — or sense of dark, daemonic energy — that sidestepped conventional spiritual categories. Through automatic writing or painting or through dreams, the Surrealists opened themselves to a primary experience of the sacred as an ambivalent, disruptive, power. Their experience of mysticism cannot be defined except as contradiction or paradox.

How is it that Surrealism “exists at the border between art and religion”?

I wrote that Surrealism develops on the threshold between art and religion. More precisely, we should use the word “sacred” rather than religion. Like Buddhism, surrealism creates an awareness of mind in our experience of the world. The Surrealists sought a direct experience of the mind — they investigated parapsychology, Tibetan Buddhism, as well as shamanic art and vivid dreaming — anything to escape the confines of a mediated experience of the world. While many scholars interpret surrealism’s interest in the mind as psychoanalytic — and certainly it employs psychoanalytic processes to critique modern culture’s elevation of reason — the surrealist understanding of mind is larger.

Surrealism goes to the source, the imagination, and provoking it to effect an authentic, even a dangerous, experience of the world.

The source of creative insight still remains obscure for us. I once received a rejection letter saying that I was “naïve and jeune” in asserting that the Surrealists were actually interested in fetishism and magic, because everyone knew that they took their ideas from Jacques Lacan. While Lacan may have informed Breton’s arguments, I find this kind of intellectualism to be blindly self-referential. Anyone who is a practicing artist knows that art often arises from a direct apprehension of something — a feeling — before becoming a visual idea. Only later does the artist feel the need to develop a rationale for their approach. Mainly, what I meant by “the border between art and religion” is that threshold between the conscious mind and the subconscious imagination, where symbols, myths, art, and religious forms emerge. The creative imagination constructs all these things — dream, myth, art, and religion — all constructs of the imagination. Surrealism goes to the source, the imagination, and provoking it to effect an authentic, even a dangerous, experience of the world.