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Abstract:
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Scholarship on Dada and Surrealism has established that psychology was a major intellectual source for artists in both groups . However , a burgeoning amount of recent work in both the history of art and of science indicates that types of psychology other than psychoanalysis permeated the historical context of the avant -garde . In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century , physiological psychology , for example , was the dominant science of the body and mind , which grounded psychic phenomena in structures of conduction in the nervous system . Modern artists saw within this discourse a fascinating and new theory of experience . In my selective history of the avant -garde’s reception and response to physiological psychology , I will argue that artists worked within and partially according to the basic tenets of this discourse , but that they reshaped its superstructural projections away from formations and taxonomies of normalcy in consciousness and action . |