Say you want a revolution: try surrealism

IDEAS, even words, have their day; the same sounds roll off the lips of one generation with a fathomless resonance and conviction, while to others they sound hollow, inert or ordinary.

IDEAS, even words, have their day; the same sounds roll off the lips of one generation with a fathomless resonance and conviction, while to others they sound hollow, inert or ordinary.

Think of the authority connoted by the term scientific in the 19th and early 20th centuries; or hygienic in the post-war years; or natural, organic, green and related expressions today.

To young people now, revolution has no particular meaning. It has settled back into denoting various political upheavals studied in history, whether in Britain, the US, France, Russia or China.

The end came in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid disintegration of belief in totalitarian utopias. Fortuitously, that date was exactly two centuries after the birth of one of the most persistent myths of modern times.

The French Revolution in 1789 gave birth to the cult of revolution as first a pragmatic and eventually a millenarian belief in the possibility of a total erasure of history and fundamental political renewal.

Very early, even during the French Revolution itself, the word came to signify not just the overthrow of the old regime but the new state conceived as a continuing project; eventually, in the last decades of its life - corresponding to my generation's university years - it had faded into the final etiolated incarnation of a never-to-be-realised ideal.

Today, we have revolutionary designs for homewares or mass entertainment devices; the consumer society has turned out, unfortunately, to be the most voraciously and permanently revolutionary regime of all in its ability to grind up culture, politics and business into a regularly rebranded but consistently predictable series of products.

But when revolution was a word to conjure with, everyone wanted to have one - and art was one of the first candidates for a metaphorical use of the term.

The surrealist movement - surveyed in an impressive exhibition that comes to the Gallery of Modern Art from the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the first important show on the subject in this country since the aptly named Surrealism: Revolution by Night (1993) - was the pre-eminent example of a movement that considered itself to be programmatically revolutionary.

It developed, indeed, an entire apparatus of quasi-party discipline, wordy and emphatic and constantly reformulated manifestos, with regular expulsions of those who failed to toe the revolutionary line.

None of this would have happened without World War I. Most of the fundamental innovations of modernism had taken place during the ferment that preceded 1914: cubism, abstraction, expressionism and even futurism.

But the war that broke out in 1914, and which many imagined would be something like a replay of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, perhaps with a different outcome, turned out to be one of the most murderous in human history.

Out of that horror arose the movement of rage and protest known as dada, but by the early 1920s it was clear this absurdist and nihilistic movement could only repeat itself. Those who wanted to do something more positive broke away to form the surrealist movement, dedicated to transforming our apprehension of reality, largely inspired by the Freudian revelation of a dark underworld below the level of consciousness and reason.

World War I had represented a catastrophic failure of rationality. The surrealists sought to reach into the alternative psychic reality of what had been previously suppressed or consigned to the category of madness.

It began as a movement of writers, and Andre Breton, later called the pope of surrealism, proclaimed his theories in the first surrealist manifesto in 1924. Despite their revolutionary ambitions, incidentally, the surrealists were willing to acknowledge precursors, including not only such obvious candidates as Sade and Lautreamont but even Shakespeare because he set imagination before theoretical rules.

One of the ways the early surrealists sought to tap into the unconscious was through automatic writing, where you set down the thoughts that came into your mind with absolute spontaneity and without editing them for coherence.

The practice could be extended to the visual arts, as we see in the automatic drawings of Andre Masson; though as so often the media of the time give the work an added layer of complexity. The lines made by a steel nib that needs to be redipped in ink are incomparably more alive than those produced by a biro or felt-tip marker, for example.

Another form of automatism was to be found in the game of cadavres exquis, where three people draw sections of a figure, the first and second folding the paper so that the next one doesn't know what has come before.

In the show there are fine examples executed in collage, which is also used in a semi-automatic but more sophisticated way by Max Ernst in his collage books composed of cut-up illustrations. The alternative to automatism of execution was represented above all by Salvador Dali, who used a semi-academic style of painting to produce vivid renditions of dream imagery.

Breton was fascinated by Freud's ideas and eventually met him, but they were fundamentally at cross-purposes: Freud wanted to heal people of their neuroses, while Breton wanted to unleash the irrational within.

He was similarly convinced that his project of psychic revolution was parallel to the Communist Party's idea of political revolution, and in the second surrealist manifesto of 1930 held that surrealism was aligned with communism.

This of course turned out to be a huge misunderstanding. The Stalinists had banned avant-garde art in Russia and considered the surrealists to be utterly indulgent. Besides, political revolutionaries have never liked sexual liberation, which can compromise party discipline and distract the individual from collective effort.

At the so-called International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in 1935, Soviet representative Ilya Ehrenburg called the surrealists pederasts (ironic, as they were intolerant of homosexuality), Breton slapped him and the group was expelled.

To his credit, Breton refused to follow the Stalinist line and made friends with Trotsky instead; together they drafted yet another manifesto.

But he also began to lead the movement away from simplistic revolutionary engagement and to emphasise the importance of the marvellous, the mythic and, a term much abused since and deserving of closer analysis, desire.

Desire implies sexuality, which is pervasive in the exhibition yet in a sense elusive. Oddly enough, there is nothing like sexual liberation here; one gets the paradoxical impression that the surrealists had much less unselfconscious jouissance than the generation of their fathers.

But desire is not quite the same as pleasure; Sade and his heirs, such as Georges Bataille, are there to remind them that sex is not necessarily pleasant; Hans Bellmer, with his sinister dolls (barely represented in the show) and the early Giacometti, with images of rape and murder, confirm a grim vision of sexuality.

What really interests the surrealists is not the release of pleasure and fulfilment but the tension caused by appetite and longing as it lurks just beneath the surface of consciousness - in the way evoked by Freud - eating at the mind and disturbing the rational everyday world through accidents, slips of speech and hysteria.

Among the most evocative works in this regard are some of the photographs of Man Ray (a woman mysteriously turned into a limbless statue) and Dora Maar's portrait of the beautiful Nusch Eluard as she touches her own face in a way that is almost more sexual and vulnerable than a much more explicit image could possibly be.

This disturbance, this welling up of uncontrollable irrational will from the depths of the unconscious, is evoked throughout the exhibition in the various surrealist silent films that are projected on walls like visions from nightmares.

But what gives these images, in the films and in the photographs, paintings, sculptures and collages a particular character and force is a combination of two sets of social factors that today require an effort of the imagination to appreciate properly, although they can be inferred from the works themselves.

The first is the persistence and power of symbols of authority that have largely lost their currency in the subsequent three-quarters of a century.

Priests in their cassocks recur constantly, as well as more specific symbols such as the monstrance; even a gentleman's white tie and tails or a maid's uniform are recognised signifiers of social order and hierarchy.

A whole world of social values and codes, which gave meaning to surrealist acts of disruption, has disappeared.

The second set of fundamental assumptions concerns rationality itself. Surrealism arose from a period that practically made a religion of science; 19th-century positivism considered it the only true and incontrovertible form of knowledge.

It had transformed the world, apparently for the better, until the war in which new technology helped kill unprecedented numbers of people and scientific reason was powerless to restore peace.

Psychoanalysis had already introduced the idea of an inner ocean of the irrational, as inherently shocking as Darwin's theory that humans and apes had common ancestors.

But the war was more than an idea: it was a trauma, a gash in the objective fabric of the rational world. Surrealism was the expression of a vertigo entirely different from our contemporary sense of disorientation: it was still predicated on assumptions deeply shaken but not yet abandoned.

The power of social order and the authority of reason are evident in the photographs and other documents that support the works here: group portraits of presentable young middle-class men in suits and ties, with their institutes of surrealist research, manifestos and lists of rules: the suits may be a little bohemian by the standards of the time, and the offices and publications parodies of learned societies, but they are still reflections of the world they ridicule.

Much of the work of the surrealists, for these reasons, is of historical rather than permanent aesthetic interest. To the exceptions already mentioned, one could add Rene Magritte, although the exhibition displays his limitations as well as his poetic talent.

Masson is well represented, and the extraordinary variety of his work as well as its uneven quality reveal the ultimate lack of formal coherence in the movement.

There was a corresponding moral incoherence; the movement was out of its depth as Europe slid towards the inevitable disaster of renewed world war. Its intellectual armoury was ludicrously ill-adapted to confronting the evils of Nazism and the moral dilemmas of occupation.

After World War II, surrealism continued but, as we see in the last rooms, the work becomes increasingly futile. Its real afterlife is in another brief but significant explosion, when automatic painting finds its greatest exponent in Jackson Pollock.

Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams
Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, to October 2