Billie Eilish — pop version of highbrow surrealism
Scary, confusing, yet attracting.
Repulsive, bizarre, yet catching.
Inexplicable.
Surrealism is an art, whether we want it or not, we have to deal with. It’s not an obligation. We voluntarily spend time in front of a painting, trying to leave, but desperately staying. There is a whole other world inside of us, struggling, fighting, yet not showing a sign of its presence. That’s. how classic surrealism functions.
True surrealistic universe builds upon the notion of subconscious world.
Some of our actions can’t be explain, since the motives are being hidden deep down. Some of our desires aren’t transparent, because we suppress the core. And the only thing being visible is our contradicting behaviour. We are constantly guided by our subconsciousness. But we can’t tell, we can’t define, it’s all surrealistic. And surrealism is what releases us from this trap.
Remember Dalí. Feasibly a panic attack, perhaps an all-pervading pleasure outburst hits us, while we’re watching his art. Our imagination explodes, while Dalí sets himself free. It’s his art, it’s his subconsciousness we see on the canvas. No words have ever been invented to communicate the most unclear feelings living in our subconsciousness world, but art, art in all its extensions. Red colour, yellow colour, black colour. Malice, happiness, passion.. Only by randomly, or not, putting the colours, he (Dalí) sets himself free. And by so doing, he undergoes and awakens his most wanted desires, his most complex struggles, the least explicit, but the most hitting ones. We watch. We interpret, we sacrifice as well, because we undergo it as well. We undergo our own hardships, by facing surrealism, by reproducing subconsciousness, thus making it consciousness.
Our subconsciousness goes out on the surface, if only it’s triggered. Triggered by us, or triggered by someone or somwthing else.
“Cause they don’t have to do it themselves” — Billie Eilish.
Having a spider coming out from her mouth, and needles being stuck in her back in «You should see me in the crown» and «Bury your friend» music videos, she does what we don’t want to. Less abstract, yet very surrealistic. Being disgust, baffled and spooked, we continue watching. We don’t do it ourselves, but our subconsciousness undergoes, what could be undergone. Inside world that we are guided by, needs one little detail to trigger the mechanism- association. So does Dalí, so does Billie. They’ve created a space for our imagination, which links consciousness and subconscious through our own emperical associations.