Surrealism and Beyond: Art and Revolution
What happens when the effect of seeing an artwork is such that you look away all the while aching to look at it again? But this time, you SEE. You take it in. You understand it. You shudder with realisation. And then, you smile in cognizance. This is closest to describing what I felt while visiting Tate Modern Exhibition ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’.
An artistic, intellectual, and literary movement led by poet André Breton from 1924 through World War II, Surrealism overthrew what man knew as ‘rational thought’, tapping into what we came to understand as the ‘unconscious mind’.
Breton defined Surrealism as
“Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express…the actual functioning of thought…in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from an aesthetic or moral concern”
Surrealism, in its very essence, has always been used in an attempt to question or revolt against the existing structures of societies, politics, countries and even the self; through the flowing use of the uncanny. By tapping into familiar sights, just to bring out the unfamiliar in them in an absurd, out-of-the-place setting, Surrealism succeeds in making you pause and question beyond the stringent structures and more. Dreamwork, desires and automatism are some of the many ways and branches where Surrealism spills and works over. It is an ever-flowing, dynamic, constantly fragmenting movement that affects your everyday understanding of objects, thus bringing out a revolutionary aspect of things you’ve always ignored and assumed as mundane.
The present exhibition at Tate is one of the very first attempts at tracing and charting Surrealism across borders, decades and even forms. For me to dive deep into each artwork and Artist in this reflection is impossible for a number of reasons being; a) the vast amount of work on display b) the qualitative breadth and depth of each artwork c) I don’t want this piece of text to become a form of injustice to these wonderful works. But a very very brief takeaway of the exhibition will follow in the next few paragraphs.
The exhibition succeeds not only in highlighting our ignorance about the movement (namely limiting the Surrealist movement to a few great artists) but also its intersectionality with other movements like feminism, colonialism etc. From Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan to Ukranian painter Erna Rosenstein, from Mozambican author and painter Malangatana Ngwenya to Spanish painter and sculptor Joan Miro, from the American Ted Joans to French/Mexican poet and artist Alice Cohan - the exhibition takes you on a ride across the world where you encounter exceptional artists, forms, artworks, decades, movements, revolutions and at some moments, your own self - reflected in the stumping pieces of art where often you find fellow stranger visitors beside you, smiling at an artwork that just left you stunned. Hence creating a spectrum of individual responses.
Using the tool of Surrealism to defy constraints goes well beyond the medium of painting alone. It spreads its wings in sculpture, travel records and poetry, amongst other art forms. And the display at Tate Modern mirrors this well, as the viewer moves between Surrealism’s various forms in the same room without chronology and geography, perhaps living the very essence of Surrealism in person by spilling over set boundaries.
Salvador Dali’s Lobster Telephone and Eileen Agar’s Angel of Anarchy have a powerful effect as poetic objects of everyday life and the impact is different when the viewer bends down to see the tiny, ‘fetishistic’ details.
Salvador Dali’s ‘Lobster Telephone’
Eileen Agar’s ‘Angel of Anarchy’
Dreams are a constant element that artists across nations have tapped into to let the unconscious surface over our peripheral understanding of reality. Max Ernst’s Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale, for instance, uses a combination of painting and sculpting elements to induce a poetic experience in the viewer.
Various convergence points are discussed and specifically displayed in the exhibition where important periods in history and the artists’ response to them are consolidated and displayed for a better understanding of that time, and how Surrealism was the artistic front that these people took in the face of war and carnage. History, identity, reason and alternative orders at confluence with Surrealism or means to Surrealism are some of the many ways that the exhibition diversifies and yet remains singular in its revolutionary approach.
There were certain aspects and artworks however that were both notable and relevant beyond measure in the present times. The knowledge of the ongoing war against Ukraine and the continuing flow of information about mindless violence, misuse of power, death and devastation hit home hard when innumerable artworks in the exhibition pertained to the world wars, death, exiles, military, protests etc. From Japan to Mexico, from Cairo to America, people have perennially used art to express their disenchantment and pain towards the perpetual wars against humanity.
Joan Miro’s Mai 68, for example, is the artist’s support for student uprisings of 1968 against years of General Franco’s dictatorship in Spain.
Joan Miro’s ‘Mai 68’
In her painting The Days of Gabino Barreda Street, Gunther Gerzso depicts the gathering of exiles in Mexico City after the fall of Spanish Republic and France to the Nazis.
‘The Days of Gabino Barreda Street’ by Gunther Gerzso
Decades have passed. Movements have faded. Technologies have developed.
And yet we find ourselves on the verge of another war. What has perhaps remained constant is our resort to art to protest, express and maybe even survive in some way. It would be a shortcoming to make the whole exhibition about the current war, but one cannot help. You move between the display rooms at Tate with a nagging, impossible to alleviate knowledge and pain of the war, of people dying. And then you come across these artworks that span decades and the globe and they somehow reflect and express your agonising feelings about the current scenario. The exhibition suddenly turns all about it and you fairly know in that very moment, why people resorted to art in the face of adversities.
Even if you’re not a fan of the movement, it’s hard to not be affected by it. Even if you aren’t aware of what Surrealism is beyond my musings of it , it is so incredibly hard to not fall in love with it.
Surrealism Beyond Borders is on at Tate Modern until the 29th of August 2022.
Bibliography
Breton, A. (1924) MOMA. Available at: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/surrealism
