It's surreal

When have you last heard the expression, "It's surreal!"

All the time, is what I say. 

The word "surreal" has become synonymous to "weird" or "strange".

Yet, that's not what surreal means.

Andrea Scott of the New Yorker Magazine, revisits the word in context of surrealism in the art world. 

She writes of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte in anticipation of a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Arts from September 28 to January 12 ("Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary"). 

Magritte's art created a jangling effect on the beholder's sensibilities because he transposed the banal and the unnerving.

Case in point is the painting "Time Transfixed":

How does one make sense of the locomotive that floats indelibly in the fireplace, and in our "normal" thought we don't instinctively associate a locomotive with a bourgeois domestic accoutrement like a fireplace.

But the presence of the dangling locomotive from a living room structure does alter our perception of both the locomotive and the fireplace, and together the two transform the ordinary scene into a strange one.

The effect in totality is surreal. 

When the ordinary becomes strange, it's surreal. 

According to Scott, Magritte "saw himself as a secret agent in the war on bourgeois values, and described his mission as a restoring of the familiar to the strange, because he felt that too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar.

In other words, the bourgeois domesticates and makes natural that which is really created/constructed, whether it be objects or values.

So that's surrealism 101 for you, and next time I hear the word surreal uttered when a centaur appears in the middle of Time Square, I'll wince.