Our understanding of surrealism has become watered down into a set of mainstream clichés: the once-revolutionary images of melting clocks, burning giraffes, and floating rocks of Dali and Magritte are so common that we see them more as design elements on shower curtains and mouse pads than as art. In a series of weekly assignments, we’ll rummage through the surrealist’s toolbox and use key concepts and techniques like chance, juxtaposition, collage, automatism, and l’informe (formlessness) to expand our photographic vocabulary and rekindle the revolutionary spirit of this movement. Taking Rosalind Krauss’s excellent study of surrealism — The Optical Unconscious — as our roadmap, we’ll examine classical examples by Jacques-André Boiffard, Hans Bellmer, Paul Nougé, and others and follow their traces into the works of contemporary artists like John Baldessari, Duane Michals, Lucas Blalock, Cindy Sherman, and others.