Surrealism

Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Vogue Features 1989 – 2006    
Subject:   20th Century  

 

They refuse to go away, those old disturbing images, dreamed up long

ago but each still as vivid as a recurring nightmare. The seeping eyeball slashed by the razor. The faceless lovers kissing. The fur-covered teacup. The woman with her throat cut, turning into a scorpion.The vast ,sagging,disembodied head, pegged out like a tent in a desert landscape...

The Surrealists set out to plumb the subconscious mind andended up by furnishing it with a phantasmagoria. It is hard to think of another group of artists who have had such a profound, liberating and persistent effect on the modern imagination - and impossible to name another twentieth-century art movement which has refused, quite so stubbornly, todie.

Surrealism has touched, and continues to touch, almost every part of the landscape of modern culture, influencing not only generations of painters and sculptors but also film-makers, poets and novelists - as well as reaching into almost every corner of popular culture. The Surrealists drew on the inspiration of the mass media, appropriating and distorting the banal or sexy imagery of advertising to their own ends, and the compliment has been returned in no uncertain terms. Their outlandish visual vocabulary has become the international lingua franca of the modern pop video, as well

as launching a thousand advertising campaigns.

Yet the very ubiquity of Surrealism, and the tentacular reach of its influence, into so many corners of contemporary experience, means that it is not only the most perennially fashionable of the various modernist "isms" - but also the one most in danger of losing its identity, of being devoured by the sheer proliferation of its own parodies and

pastiches. The drive to rediscover Surrealism as it once was, and to recover a sense of the outrage, urgency and passion that originally drove it, is the motivating force behind "Surrealism: Desire Unbound" - the first major

survey of the movement to have been mounted for many years and the most ambitious exhibition yet staged at Tate Modern, where it opens on 20September.

Jennifer Mundy, principal curator of the show, says she would like to help people "to see behind the populist notion that Surrealism really just amounts to a striking ragbag of weird images". She believes that "the reason these artists remain so important, is that they really dared to ask the biggest questions - 'What is a human being?' and 'What is the purpose of life?' They were prepared to spend their lives searching for answers to those questions." I’VE CUT THIS DOWN A BIT

At the outset Surrealism was the creation not of artists (although it was ultimately to be the artists who were most responsible for the spread of its influence) but of poets and writers, principally Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon. What these young literary Parisians had in common was disgust and disillusionment with the values of a

society that had sent so many of its young men to die on the bloody battlefields of the First World War - a conflict which both scarred and inspired almost every one of the leading Surrealists - together with a corresponding, rebellious belief in the ideal of complete creative and psychological freedom.

Liberty was the watchword of the Surrealists from the beginning. Inspired by a romantic view of the possibilities implicit in Sigmund Freud's writings about the subconscious, they wanted to free themselves not only from what they saw as the corrupt structures of power and authority of their time but also from the constraints of reason itself. I’VE CUT THIS BACK

In the Manifesto of Surrealism, a dense and haughty little book written by Breton at the birth of the movement, in 1924, the word "Surrealism" was given its first ñ and still most accurate ñ dictionary definition: "SURREALISM, noun, masc., pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of

thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations..." Later in the same text Breton added that "Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality

of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought."

Some painters were co-opted into the movement by the charismatic Breton more or less against their will: the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, whose melancholy paintings of enigmatically assembled objects such as bunches of fruit, broken statuary and tailor's mannequins, seen in eerily depopulated Italian piazzas, seemed to encapsulate the

Surrealist belief that images of strangeness and alienation might tell a deeper truth about the world than the officially approved salon art of their period.

Other painters joined of their own accord. Max Ernst, the first semi-official artist of the movement, developed what was to become one of the favoured tactics of Surrealist art, creating collages and paintings

based on the principles of random association or illogical conjunction. Ernst's indecipherable oddities were to spawn countless imitations, but in their time they were among the first images to court the semblance of a perfect illogicality. The model for this vein of deliberate Surrealist obscurantism was a line of poetry in the French writer Lautreamont's poem, Songs of Maldoror:  "Beautiful as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella." The forced yoking together of disparate objects or words was the great Surrealist trope, as well as the

one that destined to be most completely debased into a formula. When works such as those of Ernst, or the conundrums of Magritte, or the strange heated sexual fantasies of Dali like The Great Masturbator were originally created they had a shock value that is impossible, today, to recreate.

"There is a kind of precision and accuracy about a lot of early Surrealism that sets it apart," says contemporary photographer Philip-Lorca di Corcia, for whom the movement remains a continued inspiration. Di Corcia's favourite Surrealist piece is Meret Oppenheim's classically bizarre object, the fur-covered tea-cup, spoon and saucer in New

York's Museum of Modern Art, Luncheon in Fur. "It is so tremendously simple and powerful, an object that is really an almost perfect poetic metaphor for its subject. The reason I like it so much - it's her masterpiece - is that you know exactly what it's about, yet you can't quite say why it speaks so clearly to that. It's probably the most memorable image of oral sex in the world. Of course, now there's nothing that you can't see on TV, so maybe it doesn't seem shocking at all. But remember nobody talked about that kind of stuff openly in the 1930s."

Di Corcia also says that he regards the Surrealists, en masse, "as the great prophets of contemporary experience. After all, the kind of cognitive dissonance that they made into the subject matter of art - the conjunction of weird oppositions in a single image - that's now become totally part of our reality. It's what you experience when you walk down the street of any city, with images of all sorts of things coming at you, messages hitting you from all angles. What they dreamed of actually came to pass. We live in a Surreal world ñ which of course is another of the things that makes it hard for us now to get back a sense of the odd, or the marvelous, that Surreal images once carried."

The Surrealists differed considerably from one another -Breton's almost childish optimism and romantic idealism could hardly have been in greater contrast to the showmanship and cynicism of Dali - and like the members of most twentieth-century art movements, they were a disparate and quarrelsome gang. But they were united in their determination to explore a range of aspects of experience and of the world that had never been confronted before, certainly never quite so directly, in art. They also shared a common belief that in finding new ways to see and think about sex, and desire, and the nature of the human psyche, they might actively transform the world.I'VE CUT A LOT OF WHAT FOLLOWED FROM HERE. WE COULD CUTBACK A BIT MORE (politics, film info) AND GO STRAIGHT INTO THE PARARGRAPH: "AMONG THE MANY FASCINATING BUT LITTLE KNOWN..."

Early on in the life of the movement, Breton explicitly stated his hope that it might acquire a political dimension. The ambition was never realised, in a Europe increasingly dominated by the totalitarian regimes of Communist Russia, on the one hand, and Fascist Germany and Italy, on the other. But the politics never completely disappeared from Surrealism.

The exhibition at Tate Modern is intended, says Jennifer Mundy, to do as much justice as possible to the full breadth of Surrealism;so the films of Bunuel, for example, including L'Age d'Or and Un Chien Andalou ñ Bunuel's first collaboration with Dali, which opens with the classically horrific image of the slashed eyeball ñ will be shown. So too

will many of the books associated with Surrealism, in particular several ofthe beautiful (and now rare) illustrated volumes of poetry produced in collaboration between the writers and artists of the movement.

Among the many fascinating but little known Surrealist documents unearthed by Mundy during the course of her researches is a series of sexual questionnaires sent out by Breton to members of the movement.

Containing questions such as "What do you think about when you are in the act of coitus?" and "Do you have secret desires that could be thought of as sinful, immoral, base, or that you personally find squalid, vile, filthy?"

these establish Breton as an unlikely precursor of Kinsey. But perhaps this should not come entirely as a surprise. Many of the ideas that shaped the Sixties and led to the birth of the so-called "permissive society" can be

traced directly back to the Surrealists. "They won the battle they were fighting," remarks Mundy, "although they only won it after most of them were dead. During the lifetime of most of the leading protagonists of the

movement, there wasn't a major museum in all of France that would collect their work."

These days it is less fashionable to reject the Surrealists than to rehabilitate them; and many figures previously considered of little or marginal interest, particularly female Surrealists, ranging from Claude

Cahun and Dorothea Tanning to Louise Bourgeois (still alive and still kicking against the pricks) have now been granted full status as members of the movement. The Tate's exhibition reflects this trend, including among its

loans two of the honorary Mexican Surrealist Frida Kahlo's most arresting paintings, Self-Portrait with Cut Hair and Self-Portrait with Monkey. Both pictures are works of exemplary psycho-sexual confession, reflecting Kahlo's

marital problems with her husband, the Mexican muralist painter Diego Rivera. In one she brandishes a pair of scissors held suggestively between her thighs, like a vagina dentata, having cut off all of her hair (hair

which Rivera had loved). In the other, with a red ribbon tied around her neck, she stares out at the viewer with her pet monkey beside her. The animal resembles a familiar, making of Kahlo herself a kind of belle

sorciere. The ribbon around her neck is an allusion to something Breton had once written about Kahlo's art, which he described as "a ribbon tied around a bomb". The painting is owned by Madonna, who in paying a small fortune for

it may also have been acknowledging the influence of Kahlo - and, more generally, Surrealism - on her own career of artful public self-exploration and self-reinvention.

"It's difficult to think of anyone who hasn't been touched by Surrealism, even if they aren't necessarily that conscious of it," says the video installation artist Abigail Lane. "When I think about Damien

Hirst's work, or Sarah Lucas's conjunctions of unexpected stuff like melons and fish and so on, well what is it if not Surreal? I think their influence is around in other, less obvious ways too. For example, there really wasn't

much humour or irony in art before they came along. I also think they're probably ultimately behind the fluidity of so much art now, the way something can start out as a painting and then metamorphose into a poem and

perhaps end up as a film ñ well that's how the Surrealists fed off each other's art, absolutely, crossing over the genres as if they didn't exist."   

NEW INTRO SENTENCE HERE: It would be difficult to think of any area of creative activity untouched by Surrealism in one form or another. It is there in films, particularly perhaps the films of David Lynch, which are genuinely Surreal in their exploration of society's subconscious, its underside. It is there in advertisements. As John Pallant, a creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi,says,"there is a whole tradition of Surrealism-inspired adverts, from the

Benson & Hedges and Silk Cut campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s...right up to the Guinness ads of today, or the ad for Playstation directed by David Lynch, featuring a bloke with the head of a duck: Surrealism is the perfect

way to grab attention fast, as well as to appeal to people who like the idea of being unconventional..." The history of popular music, too, is saturated with its influence, ranging from the Beatles's woozily post-Surrealist

Sergeant Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour albums (the famous "custard dripping from a dead dog's eye" being just one self-evidently Dalian touch) to the strangulated yearnings of Johnny Rotten in Anarchy in the UK: "I

wanna destroy passers by" is after all only a Punk reformulation of Breton's not entirely serious idea of the  Surrealist "Acte gratuit", or gratuitous act, the perfect example of which he described as running out into the

street and killing someone at random.

Maybe the Surrealist author Maurice Blanchot came closest to getting it right when (more than half a century ago now) he attempted to sum up the fate of the movement: "Surrealism is not so much a school as a state of mind. Nobody belongs to this movement any more but everyone is part of it. Is Surrealism disappearing? No, because it is neither here nor there: it is everywhere."