Reports    Published 12/08/10

The Surreal House

Barbican Art Gallery, London
10 June–12 September 2010

by SAM ROSE

As some of the surrealists’ more creative exhibiting strategies showed - the dark and disorientating environments of the 1938 and 1947 international shows stand out - the group could make great use of interiors when they chose to. Day to day, however, and however rude André Breton was about the bourgeois nature of Sigmund Freud’s rooms, the group’s living conditions never got far from the reality they so despised. Anachronistic as the charge may be, the group photos of the Bureau of Surrealist Research now seem comically close to a respectable gentleman’s club, female secretary at hand and male members suited up for business. Save for the odd detail such the disembodied arm poking from the bookcase, even Breton’s apartment – represented here in a 1994 film – now seems like the dwelling place of a particularly avid bourgeois Parisian art collector; a precursor to that of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé that was neatly packaged up and sold at auction last year for a series of world record prices.

“The Surreal House” stems from recent academic work on the architectural legacies of surrealism. This is a difficult area, given that apart from the contributions here of Roberto Matta, Frederick Kiesler and Jean Arp, few of the surrealists themselves appeared to be greatly engaged with new architecture. Repelled by the rational designs of Haussman’s Paris, it was to the dilapidated and outmoded side of the city that Breton and Aragon turned for their early novels, and that provided the aesthetic of many photographers loosely associated with the group from Eugène Atget to Jacques-André Boiffard to Brassaï. As a result most of the relevant surrealist activity tended to involve work on interiors or subversions of existing architecture. While it isn’t strictly wrong to call this exhibition the “first of its kind”, those such as the recent “Surreal Things” have already dealt at length with the design legacies of the movement, which one could say were where some of their more interesting contributions really lay.¹

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, one spends the first half of the exhibition “inside” the surreal house. The range of art is impressive, and provides a great chance to see works by more orthodox surrealists such as André Masson and Alberto Giacometti spread among those of more tenuously connected artists. Louise Bourgeois here stands out as the one whose strange melds of female bodies and houses really do play on the surrealist legacy to bring out the repressed and discomforting sides of the home. In a more prosaic but still rather beautiful manner, Francesca Woodman’s black and white photographs of ghostly domestic scenes perform a similar operation.

An exhibition that by room three has already brought together a Rachel Whiteread bathtub, Freud’s armchair, and a Buster Keaton film, is obviously casting a fairly wide net. One might conceivably find strange the inclusion of Jean Cocteau in an exhibition on surrealism and its legacies, but as a wall text helpfully explains, “though the surrealists themselves generally detested Cocteau, his films are frequently considered in the context of surrealist cinema”. As one progresses it becomes clear that this malleable logic governs “The Surreal House”; “surreal” is collapsed into its contemporary colloquial usage, and the works brought under the banner can thus include a 1925 Edward Hopper painting, a 1999 Maurizio Cattelan wax dummy, and even photographs of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.

Casting around for some contextualisation the catalogue notes Corbusier’s architecture as the antithesis of surrealism, the artist as the group’s “bête-noir”.² As the exhibition moves from inside to outside and starts grasping around for the surrealist legacies it is to Corbusier that they turn though and, given the show’s logic they find that, surprise surprise, Corbusier was actually rather “surreal” after all. This was in fact made pretty clear at the Barbican’s Corbusier show of last year, where the out and out anti-rational strangeness of his paintings and later designs was emphasised.³ (“Corb was a funny old bird” as one reviewer summed it up at the time). Not that Corbusier was a surrealist of course, but it does indicate the ease with which other narratives for “surreal” aspects of later architecture could be drawn.

The penthouse apartment he designed at 136 avenue des Champs-Elysées is one of the most brilliantly wacky things in the show, with its rooftop recreation of a living room complete with a grass carpet and marble fireplace. Setting aside the institutional forgetfulness that rather calls into question the efficacy of exhibition-as-academic-research, it should be asked whether this meta category of surreality is really very helpful to anyone in the end. Yes Gordon Matta-Clark’s house split in two is pretty damn strange, and yes Tristan Tzara suggested splitting the Pantheon down the middle, but does that mean Matta-Clark can be neatly filed under surrealist (or should that be dadaist) legacies?

The answer probably has to be that it just doesn’t matter too much here. At the entrance to the exhibition Donald Rodney’s tiny house stands as a touching microcosm, fashioned from skin culled during operations to treat sickle-cell anemia, held together with a single pin, and set on a miniature plexiglass shelf within an oversize white frame. My Mother. My Father. My Sister. My Brother (1996-7) may have little to do with surrealism proper, but is a moving example of the serious playfulness art in the expanded field can take on. It has been argued that “play” constitutes one of the binding elements of Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre, and perhaps he would rather like the curator’s adjacent use of his 1920 Fresh Widow - a blacked out French window - as the window of the surreal house, and his 1947 Prière de Toucher - a breast stuck onto black velvet, itself designed as the cover of an exhibition catalogue - as the doorbell.

Certainly it is this use of Duchamp dehistoricised and decontextualised that sets the tone for the whole thing, and once that’s accepted then only the desperately po-faced could say this was not all very enjoyable. Given the recent BP/Tate controversies it was hard not to smile at the fact that this all comes to us sponsored by Ikea. After the stunning marketing blitz a Duchamp readymade fetched eight times the estimate to set one of the world records in the Yves Saint Laurent sale, and perhaps with the stripping of pesky socio-historical baggage the way is clearing for a wholesale popularisation. For those who want to know about surrealism and architecture, the academic debates are staged in the catalogue. Otherwise, just sit back and await the set of Duchamp readymade reproductions joining framed photographs of stones and seashores in an Ikea near you.

References

1. “Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design”, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 29 March–22 July 2007.

2. Jane Alison (ed.), The Surreal House: Architecture of Desire (London: Yale University Press), p. 14.

3. “Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture”, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 19 February 2009–24 May 2009