7 Surrealist Games to Unlock Creativity

Surrealist art is some of the most fun and accessible art for students. It is so meaty and weird and creative that kids naturally gravitate towards it. Not only do my students love Surrealism, but I love to teach it! Check out these fun Surrealist games to get your students into the minds of the Surrealist artists.

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What is Surrealism?

Salvador Dalí, Lobster Telephone, 1938

Surrealism encompassed a literary, intellectual, and artistic movement that developed in the 1920s and continued through the 1960s. Surrealist artists proposed that art should free the individual from the “rational” to express personal desires and release the mind from the shackles of conventional thought.

Surrealists were influenced by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s theories of the struggle in the human mind between the conscious and the unconscious.

In this post, I also include some activities from the Dada art movement. Dada was a precursor to Surrealism, and many Dada artists became Surrealists.

7 Surrealist Games to Unlock Creativity

Surrealists often used art and word games to access the subconscious, their dreams, and their inner selves. Try these games out with your students. These are fun ways to understand Surrealism, but you could also use these games to spark ideas for student artworks.

Exquisite Corpse

Exquisite Corpse was a Surrealist game developed in the 1920s, in which sentences or drawings were created by a group of people – each person unaware of what previous players had written or drawn. The result is a collaborative, inspiring work of art.

To play, have each member of a group come up with a random word. One student comes up with an adjective, the next a noun, the next a verb, and so on. Then, have them put them all together to create crazy sentences. Take it a step further and have students design artworks about their new crazy sentences.

You can find a full Surrealism PowerPoint in The Resource Library for Art  Teachers.

Definitions / Questions & Answer

Similar to Exquisite Corpse, have one person write a word on a piece of paper and then fold the paper to disguise the original word. The next person then writes a definition.

An alternate version of this is for one person to write a question and the next person write an answer.

Telephone

Did you know you were practicing a Surrealist technique when you played Telephone growing up? Sit in a circle in a group, and have one person whisper a phrase to the person next to them. Each person then whispers what they hear until it makes it around.

I’ve also played a related board game with my friends called Telestrations. It’s a drawing version of telephone. You draw a phrase from the card and then pass it. The person you pass it to guesses what you drew. Then, they pass it for the next person to draw. You continue until the original artists gets their booklet back. At the end, you compare the guesses and drawings to see how close to the original phrase you got. We had a great time with this! Lots of laughs. This game is rated for ages 12 and up.

Automatic Drawing

One strategy surrealists used was automatic drawing. On a blank piece of paper, have students draw continuously for several minutes without thinking about what they are going to draw. Let their hands flow freely over the paper without self-censorship.

André Mason, Automatic Drawing, 1924

Surrealist artists did this to let the subconscious take over. Hopefully by freeing yourself from planning and censorship, you true psyche can be revealed.

You can also do automatic writing and automatic sculpture!

Reassemble Reality

Dadaists and Surrealists loved to use collage techniques to unlock new meaning in the world. I love this artwork by Hannah Hoch which comments on gender in the media. Even in 1919, we were revolting against unrealistic standards of beauty.

Hannah Hoch, Da Dandy, 1919, Photomontage

Notice how Hoch uses both text and images in her artwork.

Another Surrealist activity you could do is to write a dadaist poem. These instructions straight from Tristan Tzara, one of the leaders of the dada movement:

Take a newspaper.

Take a pair of scissors.

Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.

Shake it gently.

Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.

Copy conscientiously.

The poem will be like you.

And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
– Tristan Tzara

Create New Myths, Superstitions, and Proverbs

Surrealists enjoyed playing with reality and shattering expectations. For this activity, create a new myth, superstition, or proverb.

BONUS ACTIVITY: Turn your proverb into a meme!

What’s Wrong with this Picture?

“In a well-known game children are invited to examine a picture and find elements in it that are somehow “wrong”: A person standing in midair; a dog reading a book, etc. In our surrealist version of the game, first played on July 1988 at La Choza Restaurant on Paulina Street in Chicago, each player identifies the “wrong”, or anomalous elements in a ordinary, mass-circulation picture.” (Source: Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, No. 4 by Franklin Rosemont)

Try the game with this picture. Be inspired by Surrealist artists and go for the ridiculous.

William Gottlieb, Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Milt (Milton) Jackson, and Timmie Rosenkrantz, Downbeat, New York, N.Y., ca. Sept. 1947, Library of Congress

More Surrealist Games

A Book of Surrealist Games is a great collection of over 100 Surrealist games! I recently purchased it, and I’ve been having a fun time flipping through.

Surrealism (and Dada!) Lesson Downloads

I have a Surrealism lesson and a Dada lesson in The Resource Library for Art Teachers which includes some of these Surrealist games.

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