hardly thinking...
The year 2024 marked a hundred years since the Surrealist Manifesto – conceived by André Breton and signed by a number of writers and poets – was published, and the history and legacy of the movement was explored through numerous exhibitions and publications across the globe. Like the expansive exhibition at the Centre de Pompidou in Paris, most of these reflected on the historical movement and its significance. Rather than only looking back, Surrealism Tomorrow asked young artists to engage with key surrealist ideas while addressing contemporary concerns, asking what the use value of surrealism is today, and in turn, what place it might have in the future.
Breton’s engagement with Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychology dates back to his own training as a medical student specializing in psychiatry during the First World War. Although he was familiar with various psychological methods , it was his direct experience with soldiers who suffered war-induced trauma – or as they were often referred to at that time, male hysterics – that led him deeper into psychoanalytic practices.
Coco Lindberg’s Hysteria Outfit, a wearable jacket, pants, and a sweater overlaid with ink blots in the shape of uterus and breasts confronts early psychology’s conceptualization of hysteria and Breton’s own interest with female psychiatric patients. The piece stands as a critique of early psychoanalysis, and in particular Freud’s dismissal of physical ailments as purely emotional, something that the artist sees as evident and pervasive even today. In its entanglement with psychoanalysis, the body, and fashion, Hysteria Outfit also asserts itself in the history of surrealism and fashion, most notably marked by Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs that engage with surrealist imagery and ideas.
A surrealist-inspired preoccupation with the unconscious is revived in the post- World War II era in the works of the abstract expressionists, while its call towards subversion and resistance reverberates in feminist art practices of late 1960s and 70s. The goal of the surrealists was nothing short of a radical transformation of society with an individual and collective liberation, a utopian ideal common to many avante-garde groups of the early 20th century. Throughout the years the surrealist call for a revolution and liberation reverberated strongly among marginalized groups and identities.
Arguably it is in the works of women artists, queer artists, and artists of color, with their revisions of foundational figures like Sigmund Freud, Marquis de Sade, and André Breton, that we find the surrealist goal of transformation and legacy of rebellion prevail; where subversion is not only a symbolic act but one that also attempts to challenge the patriarchal gaze, transform material conditions, and subvert hierarchies. This is evident in the works of well-known women artists such as Meret Oppenheim, Louis Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, and Kara Walker. For example, the strategies employed in Claude Cahun’s photographs to interrogate gender norms and their performance can later be seen in the work of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, and Cassil, to name a few. In all of these cases, performance and the body become central in exploring issues of identity, the personal as political, and the possibilities of liberation.
In Bobby Hays’ Fucking Unlovable, a multimedia and performance piece, the absent, missing, unseen body becomes more significant than a present one. The welding jacket, marked by traces of use by its wearer (first the artist’s mother, then the artist), hangs ghost-like alongside earth works molded into shapes left by the artist’s body, functioning like an index that transforms reality into representation. Like Ana Mendieta’s impressions of her own silhouette into earth, the absent body alludes to a sense of loss, a presence that is no longer here. Simultaneously, the performance documented through photographs and the objects displayed asserts a bodily autonomy and queer existence in the face of oppression and marginalization.
If trauma saturates the artworks of these young artists, it is partially because surrealism has always been itself a response to traumatic events in history. As Patrica Allmer reminds us, “[f]orged in the wake of, and haunted by the experiences of, the First World War, and motivated in part by disgust at that war, which it understood as a highly destructive imperialist exercise, the radical aesthetics of Surrealism responded overtly and covertly to the cultural and psychic effects of the war’s carnage on individual and cultural consciousness – both the wider cultural impact of wartime suffering and the experiences of people who lived through it.”[1] Today, as humanity jumps from crisis to crisis, it appears that Surrealism continues to offer artists strategies for reshaping our world.
Perhaps as an antidote to these haunting traumas, another psychological state lingers through a number of the artworks, as a state of play is used here to confront, process, and subvert these experiences. Functioning also an epistemological imperative to reorder the world, play, humor, and the transformation of the everyday can be seen in Worm Burden, Don’t Stop Playing, Object of Religious Devotion, A Fruit Bowl, and Two Interlocking Mugs.
Rather than escapism or engagement with the unseen and immaterial, these playful objects remind us of surrealism’s desire to apprehend and transform concrete reality. They simultaneously evoke states of play as a psychological condition and an alchemical process of transmutation.
A Fruit Bowl represents a familiar object destabilized through its materials. The innocuous arrangement of various fruits in a bowl makes the dialectical journey from representation, through its shapes evoking the use of paper in the practice of origami, and finally to its ceramic material: hard, shiny, lifeless. As Krzysztof Fijałkowski explains, “the [surrealist ] object […] participates in a dynamic process in the history of sensibility whereby reality, reason and the rational unfold through a series of dialectical crises and resolutions.”[2]
With its sources in prehistoric myths, medieval alchemy, and Renaissance imagery, Surrealism was always non-linear. Abdul Gramish’s Möbius Strip serves as an apt metaphor for thinking about surrealism, its past legacy, present relevance, and future potential. The form of the strip is emblematic of how we experience time in a nonlinear way. Memories, experiences, emotions from the past flood or filter through the present, and future selves are built on past ones. The Möbius strip asserts connection, continuity, infinity, and cyclical time. If surrealism emerges and reemerges at different points as a response to traumatic experiences, then it should be no surprise to us that in the years following a global pandemic and the rise of authoritarianism, when scenes of disaster and violence have become part of everyday visual imagery in a perpetual state of crisis, surrealist ideas as antidote have come to the forefront. And so surrealism has (re)appeared at another point on the Möbius strip, like a dog chasing its own tail trying to bite it off.