In 1916, a trainee doctor befriended a wounded young soldier in a hospital in Nantes. André Breton was working in the neurological ward and reading Freud. Jacques Vaché was a war interpreter, moving across the front between the Allied positions and disrupting where he could; he once collected cast-off uniforms from different armies, including enemy forces, and sewed them together to make his own “neutral” costume. He sent Breton letters describing his “comatose apathy” and indifference to the conflict, though, he wrote, “I object to dying in wartime”.
Weeks after the Armistice, Vaché killed himself in a hotel room. Breton hailed him “the deserter from within” and one of the key inspirations for “The Surrealist Manifesto”, published in Paris in 1924.
This slim volume turned out to be the most influential artistic pronouncement of the century. Breton argued that rational realpolitik had created the catastrophe of the first world war. Championing the irrational, the subconscious, dream states — “pure psychic automatism” — he called for a revolution of the mind: “thought dictated in the absence of all control exercised by reason.”
Yes, and I disagree with half of that.
Freud was a tormented kid who took his own perceptions way too far, but at the same time he was spot on about the existence of a subconscious possibility space with its own thought patterns, that can differ from the filtered conscious output. Nowadays we call that “hidden layers” in neural networks; in people, over the years, it has been explored through psychotropic drugs, hallucinations, free associations, pareidolias, and others, all of which have served as a source of artistic inspiration, with no need to call them “divine visions” anymore.
The surrealist manifesto —as far as I recall— other than being written in a pompous self entitled tone, only takes from Freud the existence of the subconscious, and explores its potential to be used for the creation of art.
Dada on the other hand, is not art half (or more) of the time, sometimes using the same techniques of the surrealists, other times being simple trash.
I wouldn’t call neither more or less “disruptive” than the other. They share a common space, while exploring different aspects of it… and if there is anything to compare, I’d say surrealism actually uses techniques better attuned to achieve its goals, rather than the “spray and pray” of dada which lands it all over the place.